Bassim Al Shaker

From 2011-2015, Sada, an online and in person ad hoc art school, was set up in Baghdad to support artists working through the aftermath of US-led invasion and occupation. Nearly a decade later, former artists of Sada came together again, reflecting on their creative and disparate lives since that time. Artists Sajjad Abbas, Bassim Al Shaker, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, and Rijin Sahakian each created video works, comprising one experimental, interconnected anthology film on individual and collective art practice in a protracted era of international warfare.

The North View Gallery, with support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, will be hosting a screening of Sada (regroup) commissioned by documenta fifteen on Thursday, November 14 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m in the MAHB Auditorium in the Cascade campus. Sada artists Ali Eyal and Bassim Al Shaker will be in attendance and will speak about their work after the screening.

Sada (regroup)
Sajjad Abbas, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, Rijin Sahakian, Bassim Al Shaker
2022, 54 minutes
In Arabic with English subtitles, and English with Arabic subtitles
Commissioned by documenta fifteen

Using street footage, narrative, and documentary, Sajjad Abbas’s Water of Life tracks its filmmakers’ urge to forge protest that is bigger than himself, following monumental artwork, migration, and the return to place and protest. In Ali Eyal’s The Blue Ink Pocket, a mysterious letter from an artist is authored to communicate the futility of describing violence in full, its scattering of meaning, and the power it derives through its lesser understood perpetrators and permutations. In Journey Inside a City, shot in Iraq, Turkey, and Ukraine, Sarah Munaf layers her experience as a sculptor and as part of a threatened community of artists and residents in Baghdad, and, later, as a refugee finding her way in coastal Turkey as her parents navigate life in Ukraine. In Barbershop, stop-motion animation, cut out drawings, and first-person storytelling give shape to the artist Bassim Al Shaker’s memory of his own kidnapping and its impact on his personal and creative life in the years that followed. Taking moments from popular and political culture during the 1991 Iraq war and the second invasion of Iraq, Rijin Sahakian’s Anthem traces the use of multinational warfare in its varying methodologies— from technology to the arts—to extinguish life.

The Sada (regroup) screening is part of the Refractions screening series from the North View Gallery, made possible through a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Refractions features artists who use video, animation, and performance to refract or bend narrative directions by exposing the complicated realities of cultural myths, colonization, protracted international wars, migration, and the implications of past violence on potential futures.