Rania Stephan on alÿs and mohaiemen

Drawing on her experience as an artist and filmmaker, Rania Stephan explores Knots’n Dust by Francis Alÿs, and Two Meetings and a Funeral, the documentary three-channel video installation by Naeem Mohaiemen.

Born in Beirut, Rania Stephan is a Cinema Studies graduate with degrees from Australia and France. She has directed short and medium-length videos and creative documentaries. Anchored in the turbulent reality of her country, her documentaries give a personal perspective to political events. She intertwines raw images with a poetic edge, where chance encounters are captured with compassion and humour.

Archival material has been an underlying inquiry in her work. Her most recent work investigates forgotten images and sounds that haunt the present. By juxtaposing them with new ones, she explores a diversity of meanings, triggering renewed narratives and emotions. Her artistic work investigates how still and moving images collide and collude, multiply and subtract. Approaching images like an editor – part detective, part cinéphile, she traces absence and remembrance, which are original to those images.

Her first feature film The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) won the Artist’s Prize at Sharjah Biennale 10, The Renaud Victor Prize at FID MARSEILLE International Cinema Festival and Best Filmmaker Award; Doha Tribecca Film Festival in 2011. Her practice has also culminated in works such as: Tribe (1993), Attempt at Jealousy (1995), Train-Trains 1: Where’s the Track? (1999), Wastelands (2005), Lebanon/War (2006), Smoke on the Water: 7 X El Hermel (2007), DAMAGE, for Gaza The Land of Sad Oranges (2009), SAMAR YAZBEK INTERVIEWED (2013), 64 Dusks (2013), Memories for a Private Eye 1 (2015), Train-Trains 2: A Bypass (2017), RIOT: 3 Movements (2017).