As part of this year's Reel Palestine film festival, Gulf Photo Plus (GPP) in Dubai is hosting its annual Slidefest at The Yard in Alserkal Avenue this weekend. On Saturday, Slidefest Palestine will screen projects by five notable Palestinian photographers: Rehaf Batniji, Maen Hammad, Samar Hazboun, Samar Abu Elouf and Sanad Abu Latifa.
Audiences will view images gathered from across the West Bank and Gaza, with an opportunity to engage in discourse with the artist themselves, who will be tuning in from their hometowns, via a moderated live-streamed Q&A session.
The Slidefest platform was launched in 2009, bringing thousands of viewers into conversation with both emerging and established photographers from the region. The annual event has successfully boosted the careers of many young working artists and brought several unsung photo projects to light. At the same time, photographers have been given the ability to directly interact with audiences and share more on their processes and practices.
Often, nascent photography projects that are in earlier stages of development do not get a lot of exposure until they reach a more edited and polished stage of maturation. However, Slidefest provides a space for viewers to get a closer look at the development process of producing these kinds of long-term visual projects while gaining personal insights into the lived experiences that inform the work.
“It’s been exciting to see Slidefest grow to become a staple event in Dubai’s art calendar over the years. So far, Slidefest has traveled all over the Gulf, across Saudi Arabia in both Riyadh and Jeddah, Bahrain, and has even taken place in Cairo,” says Mohamed Somji, director of Gulf Photo Plus.
“This year, we’re proud to present the work of five Palestinian artists who are all doing impactful work on the ground. We’re thrilled to partner with Reel Palestine for their eighth edition to highlight these important stories. At GPP, we believe in supporting Menasa photographers who are continuing to push the boundaries of contemporary image-making in the region.”
This year’s central focus on Palestinian narratives is particularly timely given the region’s political situation. Abu Elouf’s project Living in the Dark is a documentation of various people’s lives in the Gaza Strip over a period of years, living in locations ranging from the street to the city to the camp and hospital – without electricity.
Abu Elouf, a photojournalist who herself resides in Gaza, focuses on how people’s reliance on electricity alternatives such as candles, kerosene lights and LED have created unsafe environments affecting their daily tasks and general psychological states, even leading to fatal fires.
Working in candlelight is an element also present in Abu Latifa’s project, Education in Refugee Camps, which expands on the great lengths that parents go to in Gazan refugee camps to get their children an education. When there is no power, they provide candles. They travel long distances so they can take their children to school and they spend on WiFi cards to continue learning on mobile phones amid school closures in the pandemic. For families in the camps, school and education are a symbol of refuge among such uncertain surroundings.
Meanwhile, Hammad’s Landing is a collaborative approach to the Palestinian skateboarding scene, of which the photographer and filmmaker is a part of himself and has been documenting for the past six years. Here, he portrays skateboarding as an act of radical resistance to the imposed mental universe of violence and domination, interwoven with the artist’s personal family narratives on displacement and diaspora.
“Skating leads us into a parallel world, where we can participate in our surroundings,” Hammad says. “This participation is an interpretive dance with the built environment, a tool to assemble a community, and most importantly, a centering on the imagination. This project serves as a reminder for this pocket of freedom, as we all try to find our landing.
Finally, self-taught photographer Batniji’s project Fish is situated on the coast. Given that Palestinians’ access to the sea has been restricted since 2000 by military activity, the currently approved distance needed from the coast for fishing is three nautical miles. Yet in order to sustain their livelihoods, Gazan fishermen continue to risk death by sailing up to six nautical miles in order to be able to keep fishing the limited, dwindling fish population in their portion of the Mediterranean Sea.
At a time when Palestinian stories feel ever more urgent and necessary, the work, experiences and practices of these five artists make for a welcome and crucial contribution to the UAE’s cultural calendar.
Slidefest Palestine is taking place at The Yard on February 5 at 7pm