Imagining Liberation is a practice-based artistic research project with the aim of investigating methods in speculative nonfiction. This project begins with a question: What kind of cinematic images can arise from imagining a liberated Palestine?
Dalia AlKury’s interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries and then staging speculations of futures during her PhD practice based research, stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world that she hopes is possible. Both practices—staging in documentary and speculative fiction—are deeply rooted in posing the question “What if?,” to offer another possible world or narrative. Her work combines these approaches in the realization of her own method in speculative multitemporal nonfiction.
Dalia is interested in using her documentary approach not as a way of documenting a reality, but as a way of commanding reality through the active and radical imagining of justice and accountability. Her final artistic results are informed by grievances over the historical and present day witnessing of settler–colonial violence and ethnic cleansing of her people, as well as by personal lived experiences of the loss of a homeland.
By staging her own fictional return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming, Dalia runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of “others” and the role of cinematic catharsis. This screening will showcase her short films, video diaries and narrative experiments throughout her research.
Practical info about the screening:
What: Screening of the short films, video diaries and narrative experiments that form the artistic outcome of Dalia AlKurys PhD research.
When: Thursday April 18th, from 18-20
Where: Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
About Dalia AlKury
Dalia AlKury is a PhD candidate at The Norwegian Film School. She is an acclaimed film director whose work navigates cross-genre storytelling. Her films explore the resilience and political unconscious of the everyday hero in the Arab World and has been shown at IDFA and other festivals around the world. She holds an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Imagining Liberation is her artistic PhD research.
