Film screening and performance
October 9, 2026, 6 pm
Long Night of Museums (film screening)
October 3, 2026, from 6 pm
I Almost Forgot The Roving Body…Let’s Call It The Future | 2021, 7:12 min
Gazing…Unseeing | 2021, 7:50 min
A Song For The Loose Destiny | 2022, 15 min
Future, landscape, technological infrastructures, surveillance, and migrating bodies: the final edition of the (Re-)Writing Scripts series presents three short films by Egyptian artist Mohamed Abdelkarim. In their rendering of narratives deeply embedded in society that unconsciously shape our thoughts and actions, they highlight how pattern recognition becomes a political and aesthetic practice: for only when recurring “logics” become recognizable as such it is possible to question their supposed self-evidence and open up space for other stories, for rewriting familiar narratives. In keeping with this approach, Mohamed Abdelkarim’s three film works each explore futures in the wake of a catastrophe from a different perspective. He proposes speculative scenarios in which the present, with its technologies, landscapes, and political ordering systems, manifests as ruins, and the cinematic now emerges as the aftermath of an unspecified rupture. Even though the footage depicts known locations and originates from our present, the films provoke a sense of uncertainty that prompts us to pose fundamental questions about “progress” and the apparent inevitability of an impending (environmental) catastrophe.
A Song For The Loose Destiny depicts the decommissioned Zollverein industrial site and a group of people whose speeches, songs, and poems off-screen conjure a slightly alienating landscape of both technological progress and decline. With dystopian imagery wavering between cinematic documentary and technical post-production, Abdelkarim looks back on a future that could just as well be our past. Judging by their accents, the voices heard come from the southern United States, the leading industrial nation, where our future has been unfolding for decades in the form of devastated industrial landscapes and contaminated soil. It is only populated by those who lack the means to move to the new industrial centers on the rise.
Gazing…Unseeing translates this scenario into a pseudo-documentary interview format: a refugee recounts his experiences in a city after the flood, addressing various positions and ideological shifts about questions of economic sovereignty. In this way, the film traces the interconnections between infrastructure, privatization, ecology, surveillance, and migration, while imagining how in the near future the relationship between green movements, governments, and the private sector might be reorganized in a radically different way. Here, the scripts that surround us are not recounted but subjected to interrogation. I Almost Forgot The Roving Body…Let’s Call It The Future now shifts the narrative completely from human to technological subjects: in a world full of drones and devoid of humans, the film follows the flying object on its journey northward. Through a conversation with an anonymous figure in the background, the film offers insights into conflicts and the opposing power dynamics inscribed in infrastructures and geographies; but now the drone itself is the carrier of these very power dynamics as humans have vanished from the picture. While the first film offers a communal, physical, and poetic voice as a counterpoint to this backdrop, the other two work with fictional interview situations that examine existing power structures, such as the state, capital, or border regimes, from a future perspective.
Mohamed Abdelkarim (b. 1983 in Egypt) lives and works in Rotterdam and Kairo.
www.mohamedabdelkarim.com
