This screening is the first evening of a three-day art and reflection program in Brussels around the work of researcher, writer and curator Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

The world like a jewel in the hand is the latest film essay by Azoulay. The film engages with stolen art to question the imperial foundations of the world we live in. Narrating the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world in North-Africa through imperial technologies of colonizing, partitioning, mining, stealing, archiving, and exhibiting, Azoulay invites us to reclaim the world of skills, care for the world enshrined in stolen objects, and inhabit ruined worlds we are being told could no longer exist.

Following the film screening an after talk between Ariella Azoulay and Nadia Fadil will be moderated by Laura Gaelle Ganza.

The follow-up events with Azoulay are:

19/10: A Lecture by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 'Museums in Europe are not European'. For more here.

20/10: A Performance 'Travelling Sources, Between Two Cups of Tea', with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Juna Suleiman, Hagar Ophir, Navid Fayaz, The Kitchen and Space Fxmme. For more here.

Tickets

You can buy your tickets here.

Bio

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, curator of anti-colonial archives, film essayist, and theorist of empires and its various technologies (from partition to photography). She is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her work focuses on unlearning imperial histories, engaging with archives to generate anti-colonial knowledge and generate potential histories.

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This screening is part of 'Travelling Sources' - a three-day art & reflection program on communities traveling imperial borders carrying endangered sources of storytelling. An established academic accompanies the audience in reconciling with the tales and voices of worlds silenced by imperial history. In the 2023 edition, we invite Ariella Aïsha Azoulay to guide us on an academic, cinematographic and narrative journey on stolen art exhibited in imperial museums. Azoulay invites us to reimagine how displaced communities fleeing into Europe are historically connected to the stolen objects exhibited in European colonial museums.

Curators: Hari Prasad Sacré, Arshia Ali Azmat & Hoda Siahtiri

• Hoda Siahtiri is an audio-visual and performance artist and researcher. Her artistic and educational background is in cinema and performing arts. She defines herself as a storyteller who narrates and mediates voices that have been silenced in the past. Siahtiri’s work centers around the feminine body, knowledge and ancestral heritage. She conducts a PhD-research on the singing tradition of Bakhtiari women in the west of Iran at Sint-Lucas Antwerp and University of Antwerp.

• Hari Prasad Sacré obtained a doctoral degree in educational sciences from Ghent University with his dissertation entitled Reading Illiteracy. His research discusses new forms of illiteracy arising in displaced communities travelling imperial borders. Overall, his academic and artistic work explores cultural translation as a pedagogical project for dialogue, solidarity and emancipation.

• Arshia Ali Azmat is a graphic designer, community organiser and researcher affiliated with VUB. Her artistic and graphic work focuses on linking personal and global histories through storytelling and archival explorations. She is also contributing to a research project on vacant spaces in the city and their transformation from temporary occupation sites to permanent social infrastructures. 

| production Kaaitheater  | co-production VUB Crosstalks & Cinema Palace | with the support of Sint Lucas Antwerpen School of Arts KdG, Constant