Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art will present Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices, an exhibition featuring work by more than forty filmmakers and video artists from the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. Previously on view at the ACP-Palazzo Franchetti during the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Art Biennale in 2024 the exhibition focuses on themes of exile, migration, and the benefits and perils of transnational crossings.
Your Ghosts Are Mine unfolds across ten immersive sections over 7 galleries, each dedicated to themes such as deserts (cradles of civilisation and places of rebirth), ruins (relics of culture), borders (demarcations between allowed and forbidden places) and exile. The films and video works span genres including fiction, documentary, animation and memoir, often blending invented narrative with fact, modernity with tradition and spirituality with postcolonial sensibilities. The exhibition includes excerpts from works by filmmakers from Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Lebanon, Lesotho, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Sudan, Mauritania, Syria, Senegal, Yemen, and many other countries, as well as video works by artists Wael Shawky, Lida Abdul, Hassan Khan, and Sophia Al Maria.
Through the development of collections of film and video, the Mathaf museum, dedicated to the modern and contemporary art of the Arab World, and the Art Mill Museum, Qatar’s future museum of international modern and contemporary art, are proposing a new approach to the different forms of cinema, from feature film to video art, in order to include them at large in the writing of a global art history.
The exhibition is curated by Matthieu Orléan and is produced by Qatar Museums and co-organised by Doha Film Institute, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and the future Art Mill Museum.
Press release from Qatar Museums
Image: Wael Shawky. Al Araba al Madfuna (Part III). 2016. Video Still. Collection of Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar
