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The Political Aesthetic: Screening Series
About
The Political Aesthetic screening series explores how political action is performed by taking up space and place through artistic actions. Aesthetic and imaginative practices bring an entangled web of forgotten histories, memories, and geographies in relation to one another, mediated through new forms of encounter and arrangement. We focus on the capacity of film and moving images to reveal things-in-relation through formal experimentation, performative actions, and public interventions. We are focused both on the violence of the force of displacement, and the potency of displacement as a strategy of dissent, creating temporary and shifting spaces of inhabitation and intimacy, moving things out of the way to make room for new (and potentially liberatory) forces.
2025 – 2026
Following the first edition of The Political Aesthetic, this second iteration continues the screening series’ commitment to examining–through a transnational lens–film and artistic practices that grapple with the entangled social and political histories of colonial and nation-building projects, and the extractive economies that underpin them. Bringing together contemporary and historical works from the Global South, the program considers their epistemological and material conditions across diverse geographies in Asia, Africa, and South America. As it traces continuities and resonances within these contexts and works, the program foregrounds the ways artists have persistently challenged systems of domination and exploitation by producing counter-histories that speak across time and geography.
At its core, the program reflects on the double role of images as agents of colonial power and vehicles for critique and resistance. It does so by focusing on artistic practices that generate subversive visuality—filmic and audio-visual works that unsettle dominant discourses, rework evidentiary aesthetics in institutional archives, and foreground living archives such as songs and landscapes as counter-visual forms. As they engage with contested and marginalized narratives, these films expose the violence of official records while revitalizing forgotten histories.
Each screening will be followed by a collective reflection and discussion with local artists, researchers and filmmakers around the notions of displacement, refuge, political aesthetics, and creative resistance.
The second edition of The Political Aesthetic screening series is curated by Farah Atoui and Sanaz Sohrabi, unfolding from October 2025 to April 2026, with the support of the Feminist Media Studio.
2023 – 2024
Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance
Curated by FMS members Farah Atoui and Sanaz Sohrabi, the first edition of the screening series offers a framework for exploring the Political Aesthetic through the medium of the moving image. The program is equally interested in filmmakers’ defiant artistic processes and in the practices of dissent that these filmmakers record on film, with a focus on creative interventions that aesthetically and politically resist displacement. The films and videos presented here address different conditions and forms of expulsion across multiple geographies–from Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran to the Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, and India, to Canada and the US. These works are also committed to resisting displacement by creating spaces and places that function as refuge. Whether imaginary or material, temporary or persistent, shifting or grounded, these sanctuaries take up space in ways that disrupt the force and violence of displacement as the outcome of colonization, state-formation, capital accumulation, and border consolidation. These sanctuaries also forge new places of encounter, exchange, and inhabitation that energize and expand political imaginaries.
Each screening will be followed by a collective reflection and discussion with local artists, researchers and filmmakers around the notions of displacement, refuge, political aesthetics, and creative resistance.
Events
Axis 1 | Friday, October 24, 2025 | Seeing Like/Against the State
Axis 2 | Friday, January 30, 2026 | Haunted Landscapes
Axis 3 | Friday, February 25, 2026 | Ghosts and Songs
Axis 4 | April 2026, TBA | Archives For/After Liberation
October 30, 2023 / Screening 1 | Militant Cinema
January 26, 2024 / Screening 2 | Media as Sanctuary
February 29, 2024 / Screening 3 | Aftermaths of Displacement
April 12, 2024 / Screening 4 | Ecologies of Resistance
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