Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Khabur is the longest tributary of the Euphrates, a transboundary river crossing the border between Turkey and Northeastern Syria. The film departs an archaeological site in the valley of the Khabur River and follows the journey of Tell Halaf's archeological collection towards Berlin where it has resided since 1930. It traces the circulation of violence in different times and contexts along the Khabur River and engages with the economic and political power relations that have been transforming the landscape of the Khabur valley, displacing beings and their belongings. The film addresses photography and archeology as two disciplines emerging from the colonial-imperial enterprise, critically engaging with the imperial grammar of institutionalised archives, and examining the way it could be recycled, reimagined, and rehearsed.

Nafis Fathollahzadeh is an artist and researcher from Iran, based in Berlin. Fathollahzadeh works at the intersection of artistic research, video art and photography. In the academic years 2020-22, the are a fellow researcher in the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s scholarly program on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and are affiliated with EUME at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. They are an art director and co-editor of Momentography of a failure, a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform for collaborative thinking, artistic collaborations, digital mapping and publishing. In 2019, Fathollahzadeh was awarded a prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie for their project Momentography of a failure. They were the recipients of an DAAD International Scholarship for Artists.