Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind
Familiar Phantoms, 2023
Film, colour, sound, 42’
EMΣΤ and the Athens Palestine Film Festival are pleased to present Familiar Phantoms, an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.
Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Sansour’s own family history and her childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining scenes filmed in a derelict mansion, Super 8 footage and private photos, the editing mimics the workings of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in search of meaning. Throughout the film, the mansion serves as the seat of memory. In the rooms, vignettes are played out, adding a theatrical dimension, enlarging and exaggerating the narrative components, just as memory perpetually reworks, reinforces, adds and subtracts. While most scenes are acted out by actors, other scenes turn objects and mementos into sculptural installations, a dark space decorated with dozens of suspended love bird cages, a group of taxidermy seagulls sitting on the floor or a free-standing sink full to the brim of lemons.
The work is in Arab, with English and Greek subtitles.
This project is part of In Frame a series of satellite art projects running alongside the 2024 Athens Palestine Film Festival, presented by Dounias.
ARTISTS
Larissa Sansour was born in East Jerusalem and studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Her work is interdisciplinary and uses film, photography, installation and sculpture. Her work focuses on the dialectic between fiction and historical narrative, and the complexities of life in Palestine. She often deploys science fiction to address social and political issues, memory, inherited trauma, power structures and nation-states.
In 2020, Sansour was the recipient of the Jarman Award. EMΣT has presented her work In Vitro in 2020 as well as in 2022 as part of the exhibition Statecraft and Beyond. She has participated in film festivals and exhibitions in museums around the world, including, Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and her work has been included in numerous international biennials such as Istanbul, Busan, Gwangju and Liverpool. In 2019, Sansour represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her current solo exhibitions in 2024 include Indigo is the Colour of Grief at Göteborgs Konsthall in Sweden and a retrospective of her work at Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki, Finland.
Solo exhibitions include the Bluecoat in Liverpool, Chapter in Cardiff, New Art Exchange in Nottingham, Nikolaj Kunst in Copenhagen, Turku Art Museum in Finland, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Kulturhuset in Stockholm and DEPO in Istanbul. Larissa Sansour often collaborates with Danish author Søren Lind for her films.
TICKETS
Admission ticket: 3 euros at the ΕΜΣΤ Ticket Desk or online on the system below:
Ticket changes and cancellations policy
No changes (to another day and time) are allowed.
No cancellations are allowed.
