I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile
Unpacking the ArteArchive Film Screening and Discussion
Featuring: Aykan Safoğlu, Simone Bitton, Elias Sanbar, Richard Dindo and Gelare Khoshgozaran
Curated by: Nick Kouhi
Screening Online: July 19-30, 2025
RSVP: artearchive.org
Available worldwide
FREE / $5 suggested donation
Screening In-person: July 29, 2025
Address: DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, 87 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10013
Tickets sliding scale $5-15
Get tickets here
Doors open at 6:30 pm, screening starts at 7 pm
Film Program: Men of My Dreams, Off-White Tulips, and Mahmoud Darwish: The Land as Language
Followed by a discussion between curator Nick Kouhi, and poet and novelist Sinan Antoon
I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile presents films that blend fiction and documentary practices in their profiles of writers living in exile. From Mahmoud Darwish to Jean Genet, the writers in these films are either onscreen presences or spectral conduits for reflecting on the heterogenous aspects of diasporic identity. Spanning from Lebanon to Los Angeles, the program generates several connective threads that transcend time and space, complicating rigid notions of national identity and venerating the potency of the written word as instrumental to a dialectic that’s fundamentally rooted in affirming human dignity.
I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile is curated by Nick Kouhi and is co-presented by ArteEast, The Solidarity Index and DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. A selection of the program will be presented in-person at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, on July 29th starting 6:30 pm. The screening will be followed by a discussion between poet and scholar Sinan Antoon, and the curator Nick Kouhi. The full I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile program will be available online on artearchive.org from July 19 – 30, 2025.
Film Program:
Off-White Tulips (Kırık Beyaz Laleler), Aykan Safoğlu, Turkey, Germany, 2014, 24 mins.
Turkish with English subtitles
Synopsis: Off-White Tulips is an intimate, meditative, and tender essay-film composed as a fictional exchange between James Baldwin and the artist, Aykan Safoğlu. The work is primarily structured around Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s scholarly reconstitution of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum between 1961 and 1971, as well as autobiographical notes and intimations gathered throughout the years. Safoğlu produced Off-White Tulips early on in his career when he was in the process of acquiring permanent residency in Germany. The work weaves Sedat Pakay’s photographs depicting Baldwin throughout his decade living in Turkey, which was as productive as it was strenuous, with portraits of the artist and his family, including some that document the country’s 1979 oil crisis and its national entry in the Eurovision competition in 1980. As the film progressively unfolds, a speculative filiation is formed between the two figures through historical anecdotes, visual juxtapositions, and poetic interventions, inviting the viewer to ponder on alternative modes of performing kinship and thinking about inheritance.
Mahmoud Darwish: The Land as Language, Simone Bitton, Elias Sanbar, France, 1998, 60 mins.
Arabic & English with English subtitles
[Selected from the ArteArchive]
Synopsis: The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, born in the Galilee in 1942, died in exile in 2008, is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. This film, completed in 1998, is part of the collection “A Century of Writers,” broadcast on French public television as the year 2000 approached.
“AS THE LAND IS THE LANGUAGE” shares the emotion borne from the words of Darwish, from his voice and his inimitable poetic cadence – permitting the audience to access his work in its historic and cultural context. Darwish is filmed in the places of his life, his exiles and his poems: airports, hotel rooms, apartments and cafes. The film includes interviews in which he speaks about his work, and is interspersed with exceptional moments recorded over numerous recitals.
Genet a Chatila, Richard Dindo, Switzerland, France, 1999, 99 mins.
French with English subtitles
Synopsis: Mounia, a young woman, sets off in the footsteps of Jean Genet, first to Chatila, where she meets survivors of the massacre, then to Amman and the banks of the Jordan, where he shared the life of the Fedayeen. Throughout her journey, Mounia reads “Un captif amoureux” and, as Genet did when he wrote it, she listens incessantly to Mozart’s Requiem.
Men of My Dreams, Gelare Khoshgozaran, U.K, 2020, 10 mins.
English with English subtitles
Synopsis: Commissioned by Cell Project Space in London, UK, the film is part of Queer Correspondence, a mail art initiative curated by Eliel Jones. Distributed in a bespoke USB drive, MEN OF MY DREAMS unfolds a series of vignettes that toy with the unstable ground between fact and fiction. Thinking about this past as being materially present in fragments of knowledge carried by the body, MEN OF MY DREAMS delves into the artist’s personal history by invoking a group of men that surrounded the artist through their writing, singing, filming and activism while growing up in Tehran and moving to the US, including: writers Edward Said and Roberto Bolaño; poet Federico Garcia Lorca; filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini; singer Farhad Mehrad; Iranian journalist and poet Khosrow Golesorkhi; and also Saeed, her father.
Biographies:
Aykan Safoğlu stages interdisciplinary narrations where his longings, dreams, and contradictions challenge historical time. Appropriating technical failures, Safoğlu makes intimate memory work that defies media conventions. His hybrid artistic forms fragment, reproduce, and reorient ontological questions in film, photography, and performance. The artist received his MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (US, 2014). Recent solo exhibitions include Reckless at Kulturhaus Obere Stube (CH, 2024), Taurus at Pilot, Vienna (AT, 2023), Recess at Salt Galata, Istanbul (TR, 2022), Ebbe/Flut at Coalmine, Winterthur (CH, 2022), and I’ll Be Your Mirror at Kunstverein Göttingen (DE, 2021). His work was also included in notable exhibition formats, such as Les Rencontres d’Arles (FR, 2021), the 39th EVA International (IR, 2021), and VIDEONALE.18 (DE, 2021), and the 11th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (DE, 2020). Recipient of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 59th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE, 2013) and the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize (AT, 2021), Safoğlu holds a PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT, 2025).
Simone Bitton is Moroccan and French , born in Rabat in 1955 . She has written and directed more than 20 documentary films and series, attesting to her deep commitment to better representing the complex histories and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Many of her films have been selected to prestigious festivals, won numerous grand prizes, and were largely distributed. Among her best known films are: ZIYARA (2020) – WALL (2004) – RACHEL (2009) BEN BARKA, THE MOROCCAN EQUATION (2001) – MAHMOUD DARWICH, AS THE LAND IS THE LANGAGE (1988) – PALESTINE, STORY OF A LAND (1993) – GREAT VOICES OF ARABIC MUSIC (1990). Her last film THE ONE THOUSAND AND ONE DAYS OF HAJJ EDMOND (2024) has premiered at the Marrakech International film Festival and at the Cinema du Réel Paris Festival.
Elias Sanbar was born in Haifa, Palestine, on February 16, 1947. He is a writer and former Palestinian Ambassador to UNESCO (2006-2021). Sanbar is the initiator of the project for the future National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art in Palestine, 2016. He is also the President of the Association for a National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art in Palestine.
Richard Dindo was born in Zurich in 1944, he was the grandson of Italian immigrants who had settled in Switzerland. He left school at the age of 15 and began travelling, working in various food trades. He moved to Paris in 1966. Self-taught, he became a film-maker by watching several films a day at the Cinémathèque française and reading hundreds of books. In 1970, he returned to Switzerland to make his first film, Die Wiederholung (The Repetition). Living then in Zurich and Paris, he has made over twenty documentaries and one fiction film, El Suizo. Dindo’s films are shown all over the world, and numerous retrospectives have been devoted to him in Germany, France, the United States, Canada and Argentina.
Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence manifested in war, militarization and borders. They use film and video to construct peripheral narratives that seek to redefine existing constructions of ‘home’ as a means of approaching new conceptualizations of belonging. Khoshgozaran has presented their work internationally, with recent exhibitions and screenings at MoMA Doc Fortnight, Delfina Foundation, Images Festival, EMPAC, MASS MoCA and the Hammer Museum. With a BA in Photography from University of Arts in Tehran (2009), and an MFA from University of Southern California (2011), they are a co-editor of MARCH: a journal of art and strategy, and an editorial board member at X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. They are assistant professor of art at UCLA School of Art and Architecture.
Nick Kouhi is a freelance writer and programmer based in New York City. He is a regular contributor to Screen Slate and Journey Into Cinema and has contributed essays and interviews to Sight & Sound Magazine, photogénie, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator, and scholar He was born and raised in Baghdad where he finished a B.A in English at Baghdad University in 1990. He emigrated to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War and was educated at Georgetown and Harvard where he obtained a doctorate in Arabic Literature in 2006. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014) and a forthcoming book on the Iraqi poet, Sargoun Boulus. He has published numerous essays on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, Saadi Youssef, and on contemporary Iraqi culture. His essays and creative writings in Arabic have appeared in major journals and publications in the Arab world, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
