Catalogue > At random

'Coco's Bed' is a short film created for viewing on the iPad mini, commissioned for the X-apartment installation series by producer Matthias Lilienthal. X-apartment audience members follow Hassan, the protagonist of the film, to his own apartment where they find him in the flesh as well. 'Coco's Bed' was available on view for three days in July 2013 in the Bourj Hammoud district of Beirut. The neighborhood began as an informal refugee camp for Armenians fleeing the genocide in Turkey. It now additionally houses a large and diverse population of immigrants and asylum seekers from countries including Syria, Ethiopia, and the Philippines.

Stefan Tarnowski is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University’s Anthropology Department, Institute of Comparative Literature and Society and Institute for Comparative Media. His research focuses on Syria since the 2011 revolution, and in particular on the relations between technology, political economy and social imaginaries. He has a degree in Middle East Studies from Oxford University. His ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian media activists and civil society organisations was also funded by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation 2018-19, and his most recent publication is a translation of and introduction to Dork Zabunyan's The Insistence of Struggle (IF Publications, 2019). Liane Al Ghusain (b. 1987, Kuwait) is an artist based in Abu Dhabi. Currently enrolled in the MFA program in Art & Media at NYUAD; she works primarily as a performance artist exploring various literary and craft forms. Born in Kuwait to a Palestinian family, Liane has focused on theater and writing throughout her life, having received a BA and MA in English with a focus on creative writing from Stanford University, with interdisciplinary honors in feminist studies. She has worked as an arts administrator, copywriter, language instructor, and yoga teacher.