Muhammad Nour ElKhairy

In this artist talk and conversation, Muhammad Nour ElKhairy will discuss the artist's role in times of crisis, and the ways that politics and aesthetics intersect in his moving image practice. The talk will be followed by a conversation with media scholar and cultural organizer Farah Atoui.

Seating is first-come, first-served and everyone is welcome.

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Bios

Muhammad Nour ElKhairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan, currently based in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal). His experimental fiction and non-fiction videos examine the legacies of colonial, political and economic power. ElKhairy’s work highlights the screen as an ideological apparatus, as well as a surface on which the self can be performed. His videos contemplate the charged spaces between the interiority of the personal and a sociopolitical exteriority; and have been screened at International film festivals and art spaces. ElKhairy holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production from Concordia University.

Farah Atoui is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Moving Image Studies, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. She is a cultural organizer and a media scholar specializing in contemporary film, video, and visual culture with a focus on moving-image practices from the Arab world. Atoui’s work explores the intersection of politics, aesthetics and poetics, focusing on artistic interventions produced under conditions of struggle and duress—war, occupation, colonization, crisis, displacement– as both tools and spaces for resistance, as well as sites for critical knowledge production that re-energize solidarity and decolonial imaginaries. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University, where her doctoral research examined post-2011 experimental Syrian documentaries as countervisualizations to the representational regime of the refugee “crisis.” She is an independent curator and film programmer, and a member of the Regards Palestiniens and Regards Syriens screening collectives.

This lecture and conversation is a part of the Dead_Pixels series organized by the Intermedia (Video, Performance, Electronic Arts) Program in the Studio Arts Department. The Dead_Pixels series invites artists and thinkers to reflect on the power of art, techne, and cultural change through a curated selection of artist talks, workshops, studio visits, discussions, and collaborative experiments.

Conversations in Contemporary Art is a free event series sponsored by Concordia University's Studio Arts MFA Program. The series provides a unique opportunity to hear artists, designers, critics, writers, educators, and curators share their practice(s) and perspectives.