Inas Halabi: After the Last Sky

De Appel Arts Center is delighted to invite you to After the Last Sky by Inas Halabi. Centering around the visible and invisible slow violence in the landscape, the exhibition After the Last Sky is a rich soil for cultivating questions about how to represent and perceive violence in the image and whether images are trustworthy. The works address different regions mired in colonial violence, attempting to reveal, through looking closely, how the land and soundscapes around us are an expression and product of dominant political power and the struggle and resilience of the communities subjected to it.

We No Longer Prefer Mountains
Three different works will be traversing the Aula at de Appel. The film We No Longer Prefer Mountains (2023) begins with an ascent of Mount Carmel upon which the Druze towns of Dalyet el Carmel and Isfiya are located, drawing the viewer into a world of geographic isolation and a locale shaped by coercion and control. Weaving together intimate engagements with members of the community in shared domestic spaces and outdoor environments, the film explores how the inner politics of the Druze have been reconfigured and reshaped as a result of the establishment of Israel in 1948; whilst opening up possibilities for imagining alternative futures. 

The film is unscripted and structurally inspired by fukeiron, or “landscape theory,” a term coined by Japanese avant-garde filmmakers in the 1960s. They believed that the filming of everyday landscapes can reveal the forces of oppression that underpin one’s socio-political environment. In this way, the mountain itself also becomes a protagonist of the film, which poetically gestures towards the interdependencies between all living entities in the landscape, including flora, fauna, land, air and water where ecologies are also subject to the effects and impacts of colonial infrastructures. 

We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction
In the video We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction (2019–2020) Halabi grapples with the invisible subterranean violence. Via a gear-shifting combination of conversation, interview and expressive location footage, it probes the possible burial of nuclear waste in the South of the West Bank. As the footage cycles between fragmented conversations with a nuclear physicist and landscapes that are uneasily underscored by what we hear, another context emerges. In various ways, the delivery of information is thwarted, withheld, or delayed, and the film comes to turn on issues of representation and conveyance.

The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, could be seen as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility—the systemic networks of power and control in the region—and this work as a meditation on how to account for the un-filmable but inexorable. The slides presented under the stage in de Appel’s Aula are photographic stills from Halabi’s research for the project. The red filters on the windows are an invitation to bring the viewer closer to these invisible realities, but also to watch the immediate surrounding landscape of a gentrification process in Amsterdam with the same inquisitive eye.

Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun’s Radiance)
In Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun’s Radiance) (2021), it is through soundscapes that the listeners witness lasting neo colonial oppression. The seven chapters take listeners on a sonic trip across two continents—Africa and Europe—exploring the ways in which histories of labour tied to the train’s development are embedded in the landscape. Through field recordings, oral histories and radio broadcasts, captured near the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a former UMHK-owned uranium refinery in Olen, Belgium, the project examines how the (colonial) past continues in the present, albeit under different guises. Borrowing the title of Julio Cortázar’s eponymous novel, Hopscotch shifts between chapters whose beginnings and ends are never the same, disrupting the notion of linear time that structures both historical and train-based narratives.

A public programme accompanies the exhibition, where the research collective Sarmad is invited to respond to We No Longer Prefer Mountains, scholar Layal Ftouni will lead a reading of Edward Said’s book After the Last Sky, and artist Inas Halabi will discuss the different facets of her work with Lara Khaldi, artistic director of de Appel. 

About the artist
Inas Halabi (b. 1988, Palestine) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that overlooked, or suppressed, histories have on contemporary life. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and completed the De Ateliers artist residency in Amsterdam, in 2019. She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.

Selected recent exhibitions, commissions and screenings include Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun’s Radiance), commissioned by Europalia Arts Festival, 2021; In the Presence of Absence: Municipal Art Acquisitions, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2020; We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction, Mosaic Rooms, London, 2019; WET LOUNGE #4, (screening programme organised by WET collective), TENT, Rotterdam, 2019; Once a Closely Guarded Secret, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, 2019; Contested Grounds - Contested Colours, Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin, 2019; Letters to Fritz and Paul, Smith College Museum of Art, USA, 2018; Forever or in a Hundred Years, Alte Fabrik, Rapperswil, 2018; and Letters to Fritz and Paul, al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, 2017. Halabi has participated in biennials internationally including OFF-Biennale Budapest, 2017, and the 13th Sharjah Biennial, Offsite project, Shifting Ground, 2017. She won the 2016 AM Qattan Foundation Young Artist of the Year Award for her video work Mnemosyne, 2016.