Nida Sinnokrot: As in Those Brief Moments (2014)

Overview

Bani Khoshnoudi introduces As in Those Brief Moments (2014) by Nida Sinnokrot:

‘I first met Nida Sinnokrot in 1999 in Austin, Texas, where I was studying film, and where he had previously studied before moving to New York. We had some friends in common and soon discovered our common background as child immigrants from the Middle East. Nida’s family's history of exile from Palestine, and my parents’ decision to leave Iran after the Revolution had coincidentally brought them to the same city in Texas. Families displaced, land and place lost, resistance and revolt, people disappeared, histories and cultures fragmented…our different regional narratives are somehow interlinked and reflect each other. I had just seen his film installation ‘Anouk Walk No. 03’ (1998). (The video presented here, ‘As in Those Brief Moments’ (2014), is a more recent iteration from his Horizontal Cinema series of works). A strip of 16mm film would grind through a projection apparatus that he himself had fabricated. The film would move when set off by a system of sensors, reacting to each step and movement of the visitor’s body within the space. This was one of my first experiences with film as a visceral material, expanded in space and time, deconstructing the elements of duration and sequence while still moving (forward and backward). Demonstrating the inherent element of time in film, it made me reflect on how non-linear or fragmented montage still ultimately places film within time and space, never despite it. Reflecting back, I see it as a poetic incarnation of a state of being lost, suspended, and displaced, and I realize that it left a lasting sensorial impression on me, redefining how a moving image can be intertwined with our bodies. The viewer is given agency, becoming a tool in the projection itself, contributing to a certain psycho-social space possibly filled with our stories…I realize now how this work has impacted me in terms of my own conceptions of time, repetition, and memory, and how they figure in my work.’

About the Work:

The video documents As in Those Brief Moments (2014), which is part of the artist’s Horizontal Cinema (1998—present), an ongoing series of interactive, sensor driven cinematic installations. Traditional cinema creates the world as much as it represents it by organizing time and mapping space in ways that are rooted in particular registers of Western civilization. Here however, the mechanics of the horizontal cinema apparatus turns traditional projections on their side. The projected images are not bound by 24 frames per second but rather move with varying rates depending on audience movement. Like lines ploughed in a field, the film registers every step with horizontal scratches in the celluloid, foregrounding a shared experience. The elements of the filmic vocabulary are reconstructed as images that precede or follow the audience, creating multiple temporal levels in which past, present and future exist simultaneously. The parallel histories of cinema and war, perception and trauma, come together in this alternative grammar, as a natural extension of those whose consciousness is informed by ruptured realities across multiple geographies.

This work has been exhibited in numerous contexts and institutions, including KIOSK, Ghent, Belgium (2018); Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); 10th Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (2016); Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2015); Blackbox Theater, Austin (2002)

Produced with the support of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and Merz Akademie, Stuttgart

Screening and Booking Information

As in Those Brief Moments (2014)
Nida Sinnokrot
United States of America
Video Documentation | 2 minutes
No dialogue

This screening is part of the Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America project, which explores historical and contemporary relationships between artists from these two regions. It unfolds along narratives revealed by the artists' personal accounts that provide critical alternative perspectives and insights by decentralising dominant narratives, schools and paradigms produced and affirmed in the West.