Images de Tunisie + Green Grey Black Brown + Melted into the Sun
Younes Ben Slimane, Yuyan Wang & Saodat Ismailova / United Kingdom, Tunisia, Republic of Korea (South Korea), France, China, Uzbekistan, Italy & Portugal / 63 min
In his ‘Images de Tunisie’, Younes Ben Slimane returns to the locations where an archive film of the same name was originally shot by French colonialists in 1940s Tunisia. A minimal approach that Slimane – originally trained as an architect – uses as a counter-narrative, dissolving the historical markers between past and present with his tactile images.
Yuyan Wang’s digital collage work ‘Green Grey Black Brown’ is based on the plastic industry, where everything is bound together by an oily substance, with flora from the Jurassic period used as background decorations for shopping malls. The bloody logic of petrocapitalism, portrayed as science fiction.
Saodat Ismailova’s ‘Melted Into the Sun’ is inspired by the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (‘The Veiled One’), a dyer who became a spiritual and political agitator in South Central Asia in the 8th century, while speculating on the cultural and political echoes of his revolutionary ideas. A visually stunning work that has been exhibited here as an installation and can now be seen on the big screen for the first time.
Images de Tunisie
Younes Ben Slimane / United Kingdom, France & Tunisia / 2025 / World Premiere / 15 min
An artist returns to the Berber villages in southern Tunisia where a colonialist propaganda film from the 1940s was shot.
In ‘Images de Tunisie’, Younes Ben Slimane returns to the locations where an archive film of the same name was originally shot by French colonialists in 1940s Tunisia. A minimal approach that Slimane – who is also trained as an architect – uses as a counter-narrative, dissolving the historical markers between past and present with his tactile images. The archive material, originally created for propaganda purposes, is intercut with Slimane’s own footage from the same sites of traditional architecture in Berber villages in southern Tunisia.
Green Grey Black Brown
Yuyan Wang / Republic of Korea (South Korea), France & China / 2025 / World Premiere / 12 min
Philosophical science fiction that exposes the dark underbelly of the plastics and tech industry, where a dark slime with remnants of the Jurassic era resurfaces in today's shopping malls.
Yuyan Wang’s digital collage work ‘Green Grey Black Brown’ takes the plastic industry as its starting point and delves into a synthetic nature where everything is bound together by a dark slime – an oily substance where flora from the Jurassic period is resurrected as decorations in modern shopping malls. Like a piece of philosophical science fiction, the work exposes the bloody logic of petro-capitalism and the global extractive industry, which is the flip side of the tech industry’s vision of a bright future.
Melted into the Sun
Saodat Ismailova / Uzbekistan, Italy & Portugal / 2024 / World Premiere / 36 min
A mythical figure from the 8th century is resurrected in a visually stunning work from Uzbekistan that reflects on how ideas circulate and resonate in a new form.
Saodat Ismailova’s ‘Melted Into the Sun’ is inspired by the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (‘The Veiled One’), a dyer who became a spiritual and political agitator in South Central Asia in the 8th century, while speculating on the cultural and political echoes of his revolutionary ideas. His legacy, which today can be seen as ‘proto-socialist’, was appropriated by the regional Soviet propaganda machine as a nativist heroic example of how to rise up and fight for a common sharing of property and wealth. The figure is embodied by Uzbek poet Jontemir Jondor in a visually stunning work that has been exhibited here as an installation and can now be experienced on the big screen for the first time.