Collected Histories - Film Screening | Talk | Workshop At 421 Arts Campus In July
Jasmine Soliman and I will host our second Collected Histories event on July 27. After a successful first event in May which left us moved in a way we were not expecting, I wrote about it here, we’re looking forward to another collective event of watching films and talking about personal archives.
Like the first one, the second event will include a program of four short films about family archives and personal memories, followed by a short discussion about the films and a workshop where attendees will be asked to show one personal object and talk about it.
Below is the detailed line up, which is also available on the 421 Arts Campus and Collected Histories websites.
This event is free to attend just like the last one, and you can register here.
Collected Histories: Personal Archives and Documentation
Film Screening | Talk | Workshop
Sunday, July 27, 5:30pm - 8:30pm
421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi
Collected Histories is a project co-founded by Hind Mezaina and Jasmine Soliman. Through public film screenings, talks and workshops - co-facilitated with Jon Burr, its aim is to foster discussion on personal documentation and archiving, with an ultimate goal of inspiring and supporting individuals to become ‘citizen archivists’ by cataloguing, and exploring ways to self-publish and preserve personal collections.
This event will be broken into the following sessions:
FILM SCREENING: FOUR SHORT FILMS FOLLOWED BY A SHORT DISCUSSION BETWEEN HIND MEZAINA, JASMINE SOLIMAN WITH AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION.
At Home But Not At Home (Suneil Sanzgiri, 20219, 11 min)
In 1961, 14 years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonizers in the newly formed state of Goa. My father was 18 at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about his home—now free from the oppression of a foreign hand after 450 years of colonial rule.
After spending years thinking about questions of identity, liberation, and the movement of people across space and time, I find myself returning to this period in search of moments of anti-colonial solidarity across continents.
My research took me from the shores of Goa, to Indonesia, Mozambique, and Angola, finding brief links between nascent liberation movements and my father’s biography.Combining 16mm footage with drone videography, montages from the “Parallel cinema” movement in India, desktop screengrabs, and Skype interviews with my father, the resulting film utilizes various methods and modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of artifice, memory, and identity through the moving image. (Suneil Sanzgiri)
Rankin Street, 1953 (Naeem Mohaieman, 2013, 8 min)
A forgotten box of old photos, the lost memories from the past, and Naeem Mohaieman’s search to know the untold stories by his father evoked the idea of ‘Rankin Street, 1953′.
“The oldest negatives I found were from 1953. For that year, there are hundreds of neatly filed negatives. Each sleeve marked with the month, in father’s neat fountain pen script. After that, from 1954-1971, everything is gone. During the war, that was the first thing to disappear. In Rajshahi, another old man mournfully talked about his lost diaries.” (Naeem Mohaiemen)
Between Delicate and Violent (Şirin Bahar Demirel, 2023, 15 min)
An experimental documentary that considers hands as memory places that can both accumulate and transfer memories. Through hands and their creations, it imagines unearthing lost memories that have not been included in performative, socially acceptable family albums.
Can we see the violence of the painter’s hands in the brush strokes of his paintings? Could cross-stitch be an alphabet of some sort? The video connects with the director’s personal past through imagination and creation, while opening up to larger human stories such as domestic violence and intergenerational trauma and resistance.
My Father (Pegah Ahangarani Farahanilran, 2023, 19 min)
When Iranian actress and director Pegah Ahangarani (1984) was growing up, she thought every soldier she saw on television might have been her father. During her earliest years he was fighting at the front, and a portrait of Khomeini hung in a prominent place in the house. But one day the image of the Ayatollah disappeared without explanation and another photo took its place.
In this personal essay, Ahangarani talks about how the Iranian Revolution, and the turbulent times that ensued, affected her and her family. Illustrated with archive footage, news excerpts and family photos, she narrates her personal story, first from the point of view of a girl living in a world of fairy-tale heroes, then gradually shifting to the perspective of an adult who could interpret the complex events.
With poetic tenderness, she explains how much the lives of generations of her family members and friends have been affected by the past 50 years of Iranian history.
- Workshop: Attendees signing up to stay for the workshop will be required to bring at least one item from their personal archive, it could be family photos, letters, diaries, heirlooms.
As we did in our first workshop, we will encourage participants to present a personal object or heirloom this time considering objects in relation to one-another. How an object may be described differently or take on another meaning when placed alongside others and how ‘collections’ can be built and understood.
We will explore moving from personal frameworks to archival description and what categories our objects may be placed within, with an eye toward archival principles of description thus exploring ways to arrange, describe, and preserve personal archives for both ancestral and community posterity.
We encourage both first-time attendees to bring objects as well as the return of attendees and their objects from the inaugural workshop.
This event is open to all, and no prior knowledge about archival practice is required.
This program builds on a previous edition held in Spring 2025. You can learn more about the earlier event here.
About the Curators / Founders:
Hind Mezaina is an artist, film curator and writer from Dubai. Her interests lie in cinema, cities, visual culture, collective memory and archives. In 2009 she founded The Culturist blog, and in 2022 she started The Culturist Film Club hosted at various venues across Dubai.hindmezaina.com
Jasmine Soliman is an archivist, co-founder of Collected Histories, and founder of RepCinema. Her work focuses on documentation, memory work, and digital accessibility - particularly through a neurodivergent lens. She is interested in vernacular and documentary photography, everyday ephemera, cinema history, and mashriq and maghreb heritage. jasminesoliman.com
About the facilitator:
Jon Burr is an archivist specializing in cultural heritage and digital archive practices, who has helped build the
Akkasah Photography Archive and al Mawrid Arab Art Archive at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has a Master’s Degree in Archives and Records Management from the University of Dundee, and his personal research relates to the preservation, digitization, accessing, and sharing of family archives.