خليجنا واحد Our Gulf is One
Compilation of four videos: And the language is poured on him, Nuclear Winter, Copy of a copy of a copy and Do you see the resemblance, for Residency 11:11.
This work is a collection of videos I recorded when I returned to Kuwait in December of 2023. This was shortly after our Amir had passed away and the country was anticipating the announcement of his successor. There was a sense of unease in the air about the future of Kuwait.
The title is taken from Ali Al Shargawi’s poetry book, The Manuscripts of Ghaith bin Al-Yara'a (1990). The audio is compiled from a documentary titled "Kuwait" by John Feeny (1974).
Nuclear Winter refers to the theory which describes climatic life after a nuclear war. It is believed that after a nuclear war it would take months for sunlight to reappear as normal, leaving the world in darkness and decay. The title, “Nuclear Winter”, in this context, situates the work in a post-war stillness.
The text in the projected video comes from a documentary titled ‘Kuwait’ by John Feeney. In his documentary, he asks, “In the years ahead what of the dark will remain, and what of the light will pass away?”. The video combines images of the Kuwaiti oil fires with a deck of trading cards that depict Arab cultural icons from the 1960s, the “golden age of Arab cinema”.
The film depicts a theatre hall of children performing a traditional Kuwaiti dance on the day of liberation. I wanted to create this effect of dropping into each other. We stretch and become stretched and accumulate multiple selves, or as Donna Haraway puts it, “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.” (1985, P.15).
The film assembles found footage from Kuwaiti news reports to children's shows and advertisements. Creating a fluid flow of pixels from one frame to the next through data-moshing, which intentionally disrupts a video compression to produce a degradation of pixel information.
The audio is a combination of sounds from Feeny’s documentary and the song Khalejna Wahed by Huda Hussain which translates to “Our Gulf is One”.