“Screen Memories”

“It did not happen.” Flickering across one of the screens in Huda Takriti’s Starry Nights / Or, of that night when stars disappeared (2025), these words haunt this exhibition of three artists from across the Arab world. Curated by May Makki, the show borrows its title from Freud’s 1899 essay of the same name, in which the “father of psychoanalysis” questions the processes by which early memories are transmuted into other forms, false recollections, and allusive narratives, that are more palatable to the conscious mind and “screen” us from the past. “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess,” Freud writes.1 We cannot remember, only project.

Misinformation, gaslighting, erasure. What were for Freud problems for the individual and her unconscious are now a vastly more generalized, more literal phenomenon. The real-time operations of a networked and globalized media landscape, obscuring very real violence with smoke and mirrors, have relieved our superegos of the task of repression and fabulation, as Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has made starkly clear. Freud’s screen, a simple metaphor for memory’s occlusions, has now mutated into a ubiquitous and multiform reality—more material and yet more elusive than Freud himself might have anticipated.

The line from Syrian artist Takriti’s film is one of a dozen such messages that shimmer and disappear across the work’s two channels. For most of the work, each screen is a field of black, with Arabic lettering on the left channel and English on the right emerging briefly before disappearing. Behind the text there appears to be the traces of images that we later understand to be news coverage of the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq—a masterpiece of imperial gaslighting from the dawn of the century. What the video registers is the artist’s own screen memories of watching the invasion on television as a child growing up in Syria: a memory of lived experience and atmospheric phenomenon disavowed and disappeared, replaced—as the texts eventually are—by blurry night-vision images, “Shock and Awe” spectacle ready for broadcast and ripe for cable-news commentary.

Takriti’s video sits at the heart of “Screen Memories,” sounding a somber tone in the midst of works that are, by contrast, ludic and irreverent, if darkly so. Of the three works by the Palestinian artist Mona Benyamin, two also play with the genres of television: the news broadcast and the sitcom, respectively. As in all of her work, these videos feature her parents, who both lived through the traumas of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa. Tomorrow, again (2023) casts them in a constantly shifting set of roles as TV journalists, panelists, and vox-pop interviewees on an increasingly chaotic news program in which her mother weeps uncontrollably while trying to read “breaking news,” roundtable talking-heads scream and squabble with each other, her father laughs incessantly with green-screened images of the Palestine-Israel conflict playing behind him.

An earlier work, Trouble in Paradise (2018), casts the two as the stars of an English-language sitcom of the same name—complete with a theme song and a yellow-and-red title card that recalls the opening of shows like Full House or Family Matters. Onscreen the pair appear in a series of awkward domestic tableaux—lying in bed, crouching by an open refrigerator, standing on the living room coffee table—as they flatly read off a sequence of increasingly grim jokes, such as “What worse than finding a worm in your apple? The Nakba” and “How do you make a Palestinian cry? You kill his family.” From off-camera we hear the familiar sound of a canned laugh-track, which occasionally responds with a collectively maudlin “awwwww” at mention of atrocity. Unsettling as these reactions are—another technique of emotional misdirection through media—the work derives its uncanny effect from the presence of Benyamin’s parents onscreen, their visible discomfort in front of the camera at once comically relatable and subtly tragic. Neither of her parents, the exhibition’s text tells us, speaks English, and so they are reading the jokes from off-screen cue cards that were written phonetically—a fact which both adds to their evident unease and reminds us of even more layers of cultural erasure and linguistic hegemony.

Operating in a similar register, Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories For Good Kids & Confused Adults (2024), by the Lebanese video artist and musician Yara Asmar, takes the form of four episodes of a program for children, apparently inspired by the long-running show Mini Studio, a kind of Lebanese Sesame Street. Hosted by the eponymous Mr. Samuel, a white-tuxedoed elder with a slightly dazed and anxious expression, and featuring puppet characters and the artist herself as a clock-faced entity known as “Gloomy Madeleine,” the work is relentlessly bleak in tone—something like Pee-wee’s Playhouse reimagined by Samuel Beckett with episode titles like “A Funeral is a Party” and koan-like statements such as “Home is nowhere” and “Time smells like my mother’s disappointment.” With each episode installed in a gayly colored box that resembles an exhibit at a children’s museum, the work’s sardonic mood might strike one as a little obvious if the work itself had not been made in such a lovingly low-fi way—and pitched with so perversely unsparing a performance of misery.

“It’s teatime all the time,” despairs Mr. Samuel. Like the frozen visages of Benyamin’s parents, locked in the inane echo-chamber of the sitcom and cable news cycle, the characters in Asmar’s videos evoke the sense of repetition and eternal return that marked the serial nature of pre-streaming TV series: “There is no outside.” They also make it a kind of existential condition, rooted in regional history and the hegemonic soft-power of culture. And, indeed, throughout “Screen Memories” there is a persistent sense of being trapped in endless repetition, doomed to go on. Nearly all exhibitions of time-based media rely on the endless loop, but here the experience reinforces, perhaps incidentally, an underlying dread, the feeling of always and ever returning to the beginning to relive the experience again.