Maha Maamoun: Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers

We are happy to present Brave Wind and Rain: Everything Repeats Again but Differently, the nineteenth and last online screening in the Cosmos Cinema Educational Film Program, as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale. This week features Maha Maamoun’s Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers (2013, 5 minutes).

Installed in the “Brave Wind and Rain” section of the biennale’s exhibition, Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers dramatizes the act of listening and connecting to others within the mundane cosmos that surrounds us all.

Filmed at al-Azhar Park in Cairo, the film is based on ambient sounds and snippets of chatter from couples in the park that are overlaid by a scripted conversation between a man and a woman. Beginning with reference to a verse from the Qu’ran—in which a djinn reports that shooting stars are heaven’s defenses against spies—their discussion moves into the nature of truth, intimacy, privacy, voyeurism, and transgression. The park becomes a stage for the interplay between conversational and rhetorical forms of speech, with the meaning of the couple’s argument inflected by its function as flirtation. As we listen to their confidential conversation, the question arises of whether we might be guilty of breaching their privacy. As Daniella Sander has asked, does this mean that we, like the djinn, will “be punished by the cosmos for eavesdropping”?

The work is available for viewing through March 30 on cosmoscinema.art.

This is the final installment in a program which has made available to viewers unable to visit Shanghai the integral role played by moving image works within the biennale by: Itziar Barrio, Yin-Ju Chen, Saodat Ismailova, Deimantas Narkevičius, Liu Xin, Maha Maamoun, Agnieszka Polska, Raqs Media Collective, Ho Rui An, Liu Yujia, He Zike, Julieta Aranda, Jakub Štourač and Anna Lunakova, and Zhou Xiaohu.

The Cosmos Cinema website is the place where the histories of cinema excavated in weekly screenings at the Power Station of Art meet the moving-image works of artists represented in the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Each week, in alignment with one of the nine thematic sections that structure Cosmos Cinema, a selected moving-image work by one its artists is presented online with new contextualizing information. The Cosmos Cinema website will feature work by artists including Itziar Barrio, Yin-Ju Chen, Saodat Ismailova, Deimantas Narkevičius, Liu Xin, Maha Maamoun, Agnieszka Polska, Raqs Media Collective, Ho Rui An, Liu Yujia, He Zike, Julieta Aranda, Jakub Štourač and Anna Lunakova, and Zhou Xiaohu, among many others.

Cosmos Cinema Educational Film Program and online platform are made possible by .ART Registry.

It is also co-sponsored by Aesop and Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus of Duke Kunshan University.