Artwork Details

  • Artist Yazan Khalili
  • Title Scouting for Locations – Film title: Traces of a Scream
  • Date 2013
  • Medium 51 colour photographs and text
  • Dimensions Variable
  • Credit Commissioend and produced by Sharjah Art Foundation
Scouting for Locations – Film title: Traces of a Scream Image

Overview

A film crew disappears in Sharjah while scouting locations for a film based on Ghassan Kanafani’s 1963 novel Men in the Sun. All that remains are their photographs of possible sites for the film, and a scream that was voiced in an empty, dimly lit alley.

This project attempts to find the missing through a reconstruction of their journey and the voice that lingers in the alley. Photographs, which were e-mailed to the producer without any further details, are organised on a wall in a timeline chronicling the crew’s movement through the city. While the scream is examined as evidence, no one is certain whose scream it was: that of a member of the crew or one of the many witnesses to their disappearance.

It is said that the crew is still roaming the city, scouting for public spaces, but as soon as they enter public space, they become invisible; this is why they will never be found. Was the scream a cry of fear or was it a demand for visibility? Is the demand for visibility in public space a demand for political existence?

Scouting for Locations – Film title: Traces of a Scream, 2013

Yazan Khalili
Scouting for Locations – Film title: Traces of a Scream, 2013
51 colour photographs and text
Dimensions variable
Installation view
Commissioend and produced by Sharjah Art Foundation

Related

Scouting for Locations – Film title: Traces of a Scream

Khalili, Yazan

people

Yazan Khalili’s photography explores the relationship between the social and spatial elements of the built environment and the greater landscape.