I can call this progress to halt

As part of the ongoing project I can call this progress to halt curated by Suzy Halajian, a two-day screening program will take place at the Sursock Museum. 

Artists featured in the film program include Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Basma Alsharif, Marwa Arsanios, Phil Collins, Shadi Habib Allah, Sharon Hayes, Jibade Khalil Huffman, and Rosalind Nashashibi.

I can call this progress to halt is a project that considers gestures of protest, unrest, and incendiary exchange as the starting point to a conversation. Multimedia works and formats on view represent images of conflict and strife that are oftentimes stripped of their original or intended context. Considered together, they function more as dispersed, floating representations of contested moments in time that refuse to stand fixed, and instead vehemently call for another engagement with the world, an imagined world.

The first chapter of I can call this progress to halt opened with an exhibition and a series of screenings, presentations, and performances, which ran from March 8 until April 23, 2017 at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). 

Thursday 29 June 

Shadi Habib Allah
Daga’a, 2016
HD video, color, sound, 18:56'
Courtesy of the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai 

Rosalind Nashashibi

Electrical Gaza, 2015

16mm film, animation, color, sound, 17'
Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London

Basma Alsharif
Deep Sleep, 2014
HD transfer from super 8mm film, color, sound, 12:45'                                                        
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès

Jibade Khalil-Huffman                                                                                                                          
First Person Shooter, 2016
HD video, color, sound, 23:02'
Courtesy of the artist 

If This Means You, 2016                                                                                                                      
Video, color, sound, 5:45'                                                                                                       
Courtesy of the artist 

Friday 30 June

Sharon Hayes
I Didn’t Know I Loved You, 2009
Video, color, sound, 10:30'
sound recorder: Becca Blackwell; speakers: Aybike Esin Tumluer, Gizem Aksu, Tuna Erdem, Sema Semih, Sanem İlçe, Barış Ger, Seyhan Arman; camera: Özcan Vardar
I Didn’t Know I Loved You was originally made for the Istanbul Biennial, 2009, curated by What, How & for Whom/WHW
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin 

Marwa Arsanios
Olga's Notes, all those restless bodies, 2015                                                                                         
HD video, color, sound, 23'
Courtesy of the artist

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Only the beloved keeps our secrets, 2016
HD video, color, sound, 10:09'
Courtesy of the artists and Abraaj Art Prize 

Phil Collins
marxism today (prologue), 2010
HD video, color, sound, 35'                                                                                                                       
Courtesy of the artist and Shady Lane Productions 
 

Suzy Halajian is a Los Angeles-based independent curator and writer. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. She recently curated I can call this progress to halt, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2017); At night the states, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Harry Dodge: The Inner Reality of Ultra-Intelligent Life, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2016); The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning, Human Resources, Los Angeles (2015); Nothing is forgotten, some things considered, UKS, Oslo (2012); and Lawrence Weiner: Impeded Time, Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna (2012).