GLOBAL ART DIALOGUES:
LANGUAGE OF SAMPLING

“Sampling is the language of the dispossessed.” This introspective statement from artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, whose film And yet my mask is powerful Part 1 (2016) is included in After Hope: Videos of Resistance, provides the jumping-off point for this Global Art Dialogue. Sampling — of sound, images, film, texts, archives — involves a process of extraction, layering, and looping that can mirror the disruption and fragmentation of marginalized or erased histories. Artists employ sampling to exert agency and power in the reconstruction of historical narratives. In this timely conversation moderated by Sentient.Art.Film.’s Keisha N. Knight, artists Basel Abbas, Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Zeina Barakeh, and Ufuoma Essi discuss how their practices and processes bridge ruptures in time and history.

Past: April 12, 2021, 9 am

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation, and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. Their approach has been largely one of sampling materials, both existing and self-authored, in the form of sound, image, text, and objects and recasting them into altogether new “scripts.” The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances. 

Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and nonfiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with special interest in the sonic in film, political film and media, and West Indian film/video. Brown is a board member and an associate programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum. She is currently on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design.

Keisha N. Knight, the founder of Sentient.Art.Film., has spent the majority of her adult life between New York City and Asia. She is committed to deimperialization and the expansion of the collective imagination. Knight passionately believes that the entire life cycle of a film, from conception to circulation, is a creative process that can expand or constrict what and how we imagine. Knight’s practice-based inquiry and theoretical explorations are aimed at understanding power structures embedded in and around cinema and art.

Ufuoma Essi is a London-based video artist and filmmaker who works with film and moving image as well as photography and sound. Through explorations with the archive, she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of historical narratives. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery, she seeks to recenter the marginalized histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of black women. Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Zeina Barakeh is a Bay Area–based artist whose work, rooted in her experiences of growing up in Beirut, deconstructs war. In 2020, her animation Projections From The Third Half [Cloud Storm] was published in Art Journal Open. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including at the Asian Art Museum; MOCA Yinchuan, China; Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island; The Center for Book Arts, New York; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; Harlem International Film Festival, New York; PULSE New York; and KINO im Kulturhaus, Berlin. Barakeh is assistant dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute.