Arab Cinema
My first book The Skin of the Film includes some inspiring works by Arab (and diaspora) filmmakers. Since 2002 I have focused on experimentation in media art in the Arab world, traveling to Beirut, Cairo, Tangier, Dubai, and other cities where these precious works can be seen. In 2025 I was on the feature film jury of the Saudi Film Festival and saw some wonderful works.
My award-winning Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2015) examines this work in loving thematic chapters
"Refreshing electronic flows in Arab artists’ video," catalogue essay for “Maknana: An Archaeology of New Media Practices in the Arab World,” curated by Ala Younis and Haytham Nawar. Diriyah Art Futures, Riyadh, 2025
“Unworkshoppable cinema: A review of the Cairo Video Festival,” Mada Masr. February 20, 2025.
“Can cinema slow the flow of blood?”, revised version, Routledge Handbook of Arab Cinema, ed. Noha Mellor (London and New York: Routledge, 2024). 252-264.
“Process Thinking for Islamic Art and Media Art: Performative Abstraction and Collective Transformation,” in Made for the Eye of One Who Sees: Canadian Contributions to the Study of Islamic Art and Archaeology, ed. Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum. 376-390. Awarded prize for best edited collection by the University Art Association of Canada, 2023.
“Cosmic Confidence: Jawa El Khash’s Raqqa 2.0,” response to Jawa El Khash’s 3D media archive, Raqqa 2.0, 2022.
“A World Where Flowers Reign,” essay for Jawa El Khash’s virtual-reality work The Upper Side of the Sky. Western Front, Vancouver, 2021.
“Flashes of Arab Communism,” coda to The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, ed. Aga Skrodza, Kasia Marciniak, and Xiaoning Lu. (Oxford University Press, 2020.
My program for the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Colgate, NY, June 13-19 2015, brought together Arab and other international filmmakers around the theme The Scent of Places—عطر الأماكن
"Arab media art: experiments in exhibition," in Film Festival Yearbook: Film Festivals and the Middle East, ed. Dina Iordanova and Stefanie Van de Peer (St. Andrews University Press, 2014)
“Arab Glitch,” in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Visual Practice in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Anthony Downey (I.B. Tauris/Ibraaz Publishing, 2014). On Selected Writings page
“Imaginal Materials,” catalogue essay, Spectral Imprints, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, ed. Nat Muller (2012). On Selected Writings page
“Calligraphic Animation: Documenting the Invisible,” in Animation 6:3, special issue on documentary (November 2010): 245 - 262.
“Mounir Fatmi,” Millennium Film Journal, 53 (Fall/Winter 2010)
“Akram Zaatari’s In This House: Diagram with Olive Tree,” catalogue essay, Akram Zaatari, Earth of Endless Secrets (Frankfurt: Portikus Gallery, 2010), 228-231.
“Geopolitics hides something in the image; Arab cinema unfolds something else,” in Cinema at the Periphery, ed. Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 232-253. On Selected Writings page
“Mohamed Soueid’s Cinema of Immanence,” Jump Cut 49 (2007)
“Asphalt Nomadism: The new desert in contemporary Arab cinema,” in Landscape Cinema, ed. Martin Lefebvre (Routledge, 2006). On Selected Writings page
“What Is That ‘And’ between Arab Women and Video? The Case of Beirut,” Camera Obscura 18:2 (December): 41-70. On Selected Writings page.
“Signs of the time: Deleuze, Peirce and the documentary image,” in The Brain Is the Screen: Gilles Deleuze's Cinematic Philosophy, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), 193-214. On Selected Writings page.
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