In the Middle East, the cactus – a symbol of resilience because of its spines and hardiness – is used for its fruit and to separate houses and villages, In 1998, Khaled Abdulwahed took a few photographs of a cactus field near his home, southwest of Damascus. In 2012, those cactus fields were destroyed by the war, creating a new landscape. On the wall in a courtyard in Berlin, Abdulwahed deconstructs and reconstructs the photographs: between the deformation of the field and that of the image, between the original and the copy, his movie rewrites his memory.
Biography
film director
Khaled Abdulwahed
(1975, Syria) studied at the Adham Ismail Centre for Fine Arts di Damasco and graphic design at the Frederick University in Nicosia. His photography and paintings artworks exhibited in several galleries, both in the Middle East and in Europe. Since 2011 Khaled Abdulwahed has directed numerous short and experimental documentary films that screened in festivals and art spaces over the world, such as Berlin Art Biennale, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Arab World Institute in Paris.
FILMOGRAFIA
Bullet (cm, 2011), Tuj (doc, cm, 2012), Slot in Memory (cm, 2013), Jellyfish (doc, 2016), Backyard (cm, 2018), Stranger's Diaries (coregia Amel Alzakout, videoinstallazione, mm, 2019), Purple Sea (coregia Amel Alzakout, doc, 2020), Home Sweet Home (coregia Amel Alzakout, cm, 2020).