If Venice awarded a Golden Lion for the slickest geopolitical curating, it would go this year to Qatar’s display of some forty video installations from the MENASA region. ‘Expanded cinema’ was a fad in the West maybe fifteen years past, but the kinds of budgets required to let every filmmaker claim multiple projectors only later became the norm for art in the Middle East. This colossal show more than makes up for any historical shortfall as it deploys video’s most lavish smoke and mirror techniques to frame human journeys across desert and sea.
On paper, there’s plenty to cherish here. Cherri, Neshat, or Shawky are all surely binge-worthy, and the rest of the hundred-hour programme should not be taken lightly. But this project’s ‘expansion’ leads instead to fragmentation. The multiplicity of narratives and the exhibition’s non-linearity wrap the mind around the cinematic apparatus instead of allowing it to follow the works on their own. This attempt at building pan-Arabic film aesthetics, therefore, falls prey to the art technician’s trickery and buries the expended film fad for good.
