Performing Archaeology توظيف علم الآثار // post-screening conversation with Nadia Dina Yahlom

screening of four short films | total Running time: 62m | book tickets

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post-screening conversation with Nadia Dina Yahlom

A compelling screening of four short films that delve into the manipulation of archaeological heritage and erasure of folkloric traditions by the occupying zionist entity, revealing the cultural destruction of colonial control.

She Still Wears Kohl and Smells Like Roses

She Still Wears Kohl and Smells Like Roses retells the story of a collection of glass vessels from the V&A collection that were excavated in Palestine and Syria. 

director: Dima Srouji
Genre: short, experimental
year of release: 2023
Original Language: arabic (English subtitles)

Performing Archeology

The Israeli government encourages illegal settlers, carrying weapons, to enter Sebastia for mass religious tourism. The tourists use the archaeological monuments as a stage set to perform, with costumes on, the singular narratives of Ancient Samaria. Bulldozers are used through the archaeological site systematically to destroy the small Palestinian-owned businesses in the site. As the objects and their context are continually altered along with their voices and memories, this film questions: what if the ground could speak for itself? 

director: Dima Srouji
Genre: Short, Experimental 
Year of Release: 2019
Original Language(s): Arabic, English (English subtitles)

Sebastia سبسطية

Sebastia, a small archaeological town, sits on top of a hill Northwest of Nablus, Palestine surrounded by Shavei Shomron, an illegal Israeli settlement and confiscated agricultural fields of olive groves and apricot trees.

This ancient site was excavated multiple times over the last century by colonial archaeologists funded by Zionist individuals and institutions. The first excavation of 1908 led by Harvard University took advantage of Sebastia locals including women, men, and children as cheap labor digging their own land for the sake of biblical archaeology. Each excavation extracted soil and artifacts from the ground, taking what they considered valuable to their home institutions and leaving pottery shards and rubble on the surface.

Today, what’s left of the archaeological monuments is contested by the nearby settlement as well as the Israeli military. The Roman Forum is a battlefield, but the locals are incredibly resilient.

director: Dima Srouji
Genre: short, Experimental, history
year of release: 2020
Original Languages: Arabic, (English subtitles)

our songs were ready for all wars to come أعددنا الأغاني للحروب القادمة

Choreographed scenes based on documented folktales from Palestine, the film aims to create a new aesthetic form to re-awaken latent stories based around water wells and their connection to communal rituals around notions of disappearance, mourning, and death. our songs were ready for all the wars to come explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge, and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can ‘folklore’ become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it?

director: Noor Abed
Genre: short, Experimental
year of release: 2021
Original Languages: arabic (English subtitles)

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Age suitability: 16+
Content warnings: Themes of cultural appropriation, historical violence, colonial archeology, land appropriation, and mourning. 

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About the guest

Nadia Dina Yahlom is a Palestinian-Jewish and British artist, curator and researcher working with speculative fiction, film, photography, drawing and objects and a co-founder of Sarha Collective, a platform for experimental art forms from Palestine and the broader SWANA region. Her practice explores ways of sensing beyond seeing, the bio/necropolitical between Palestine and the UK and how humans, artefacts and landscapes bear witness to colonial violence. She has worked with Battersea Arts Centre, British Council (Yemen), Rich Mix, ICA, Open City Docs, Tate Britain, Southbank Centre and many others.

Events are ticketed but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please reach out.