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Manal Issa, 2024 + The Diary of a Sky + Q&A
Institute of Contemporary Arts


Book tickets

Manal Issa, 2024 Elisabeth Subrin | 2025 | Lebanon, USA | 10’ | Digital | French spoken

Revisiting their previous collaboration, Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), in which Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa reenacted a televised interview given by Maria Schneider, Elisabeth Subrin poses the same questions again on September 22, 2024, in Beirut. Issa now appears only in voice, talking about refusal and the inadequacies of an ultimately capitalist industry, one reluctant to show resistance, as sonic booms rumble off screen.


The Diary of a Sky
Lawrence Abu Hamdan | 2024 | Lebanon | 44’ | Digital | Arabic spoken, English subtitles

Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a sonic research practice that acts to investigate human rights abuses. In this essay film he focuses his “Private Ear” into analysing sonic data generated by the UN to chart the incessant noise pollution emanating from unauthorised Israeli plane and drone flights into Lebanese airspace. His study focuses upon a period of relative silence in Beirut, the streets of the city emptied by the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-2021. UN data is combined with video documentation of the skies above Beirut, filmed and gathered by Abu Hamdan. In this space he carefully charts the sonic incursions of the sometimes invisible but ever-present, manned and unmanned, which the artist describes as “atmospheric violence”.

Followed by a Q&A with Elisabeth Subrin.
 
Book tickets
03:00 pm
Sat, 10 May 2025
Cinema 1
Ticket information
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Cinema 1
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