Image – Witness – Screen

This program compiles four experimental films that examine the image as a contested site of memory, witnessing, and human atrocity in the digital age. Working through online found footage, Google Maps Street View, algorithmic infrastructures, and acts of artistic destruction, the filmmakers question how histories of dispossession and the ongoing genocide in Gaza are mediated, circulated, suppressed, and remembered. Rather than producing new images, the films return to those that already exist - reassembling, interrupting, or refusing them altogether - to consider the ethical limits of representation and the possibilities of witnessing when images have become both overwhelming and, in a way, reproducing them redefines their intention and context within the sphere of endless mediated violence on our screens.

The program examines how these videos respond to the internet as a visual field of violence happening in real time. By re-editing, destroying, obscuring, or navigating images already circulating online, the films ask how digital imagery can be removed from the speed and disposability of the feed and recontextualized as testimony, memory, and political witness.

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Palcorecore
Directed by Dana Dawud | 2023 | 5:35’

“Palcorecore (Palestine) by Dana Dawud is a chilling, mesmerizing series of dances and repurposed archival footage that circulated on the internet in and around Palestine. It begins with a performance clip of The Lovers Songs Band and includes material from Jenin, Jenin (2003), which has been banned in Israel. A rejoinder to Serge Daney’s statement that “there’s no image of Palestine,” the film announces itself with short spurts of video that splice the distant past and unfolding present into a single reel: a lone horseback-rider, nearly standing up, holding a Palestinian flag; stills of a family at leisure on the beach; teenagers dancing on a burning field; a group of boys doing backflips off a damaged building; women confronting soldiers; people throwing stones at military vehicles. The deadpan narration borders on provocation: “I witness you witness me, we are martyrs together,” Dawud draws the viewer into the film. Dawud induces aesthetic disorder to register the realities of Palestinian life, paying particular attention to women, youth, movement, leisure, and resistance to occupation.” Lucy Sternbach for Screen Slate

Dana Dawud makes films, texts, and images. Her work is interested in the lives of images online, and the ways technology reshapes memory, intimacy, and storytelling.

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Man Number 4
Directed by Miranda Pennell | 2024 | 10’

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

Miranda Pennell is a London-based artist-filmmaker whose films often rework images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations. Her work emphasises the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents.Her award-winning films have screened as part of New York Film Festival ‘Currents’, Berlinale, FID Marseille, Viennale, IDFA, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, 25 FPS International Experimental Film Festival Zagreb and Open City Documentary Festival, among others. Selected one-person programmes include ‘H is for History N is for Now’ at Solar Cine-Gallery and at Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (Pt) (2026), VFX Festival of Audiovisual Practices Ljubljana (2026); ‘Returning the Gaze’ at Documenta Madrid (2025), ‘ Strange Objects (2023) at Close-Up Film Centre, London, retrospectives at Stuttgart FilmWinter Festival for Expanded Media (2019), Choreography and Archives for UnderDox at the Filmmuseum Munich (2017), retrospectives at Glasgow Short Film Festival (2011), Vienna International Shorts (2011), Tampere Short Film Festival (2009) Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2006).Group exhibitions include Eye/s Open – New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage at the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2026) Evil Eye: the parallel histories of ballistics and optics (2023) at Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture , San Sebastian; Tanzbilder, New Museum for Art and Design, Nuremberg (2019); All Systems Go, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2016), Europe – The Future of History, Kunsthaus Zurich (2015).

Miranda has an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, London. Her PhD from the Centre for Research in Education in Arts and Media at University of Westminster resulted in the feature-length film The Host and her thesis Film as an Archive for Colonial Photographs: Activating the Past in the Present.

She currently leads the triannual Politics and Poetics of Archival Filmmaking course for UCL Public Anthropology and Open City Documentary Festival.

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The Image Has No Right To Exist
Directed by Fai Ahmed | 2025 | 5:17’

Ever-present but unseen algorithms are described as the “ghosts” haunting our digital rights, freedom of speech, and privacy. Here, ‘The Image Has No Right To Exist’ mirrors the endeavor to deconstruct language and resist algorithmic oppression. Just as the project explores the invisible forces shaping narratives like the Palestine-Israel conflict and how the conflict becomes an “image event” dominated by algorithmic influence, it also prompts questions about the nature of visibility and invisibility in the digital age. Reinterpreting Hauntology in the context of the digital age parallels the act of confronting the spectral presences of algorithms and highlights their pervasive impact on digital rights.

Fai Ahmed is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work explores the politics of memory, technology, with a focus on the aesthetics of digital error and the materiality of the media. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. Ahmed published her first art book, Untitled Album, in 2020 and has exhibited her work in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and New York City. Her work has been supported by numerous awards and grants, including an In-Practice Residency with Slavs and Tatars at Art Jameel (2023), a Production Grant from Culture Resource (2021), and a Merit Scholarship from The New School (2022-2024).

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The Sight is a Wound
Directed by Parham Ghalamadar | 2024 | 6:49’

The Sight is a Wound by Parham Ghalamdar is a haunting meditation on the collapse of imagery in the face of modern atrocities. The film begins with a simple question: What can the artist offer when the images of our time overwhelm the capacity of frames to contain them? In the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza—live-streamed by its perpetrators and rendered unbearable in its clarity—Ghalamdar burns over 50 of his own paintings, works exhibited in solo and group shows across renowned institutions worldwide. The act of destruction becomes a visceral response to the impossibility of creating images with greater urgency or ethical weight than those emerging from Gaza’s harrowing reality. Flames consuming canvases dominate the screen, transforming the medium of painting into ash and silence. The film is neither a documentary nor a protest piece but a striking video-poem exploring the moral and philosophical collapse of image-making itself. It presents a stark challenge to artists and audiences alike, urging a reckoning with complicity, desensitization, and the ethical failure of seeing in the age of digital oversaturation. "The Sight is a Wound" is not just a film; it is a funeral for the image and an invocation of silence.

Parham Ghalamdar is a multidisciplinary artist. Ghalamdar’s work traces forgotten mythologies, buried philosophies, and visual ruins, reconfiguring them into speculative worlds where memory, fiction, and futurism collapse into one another. Drawing on cybernetic theory and generative AI, he explores how systems of feedback, simulation, and machine vision mediate our understanding of history and possibility. Through painting, film, and writing, he builds narratives that feel both ancient and yet-to-come, haunted by lost histories and animated by possible futures.