On Feb. 4, Emerson’s Media Art Gallery opened a new multi-media exhibition: “Entire Nations are Built on Fairy Tales.” The exhibition features two films and a dramatic sculpture installation from artists Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, who spoke with Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Dr. Leonie Bradbury in a live Q&A at the Gallery Wednesday evening.
In their work, Sansour and Lind often use narrative to examine current and historical political discourse surrounding the ongoing crisis in the Middle East—Sansour is Palestinian and spoke of her perspective as a member of an ethnic group that has become increasingly politicized.
The exhibition’s first film, “As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night,” is an Arabic-language opera projected on the largest wall of the gallery. Starring soprano Nour Darwish, Emerson Contemporary describes the piece as an opera focusing on “loss, mourning and inherited trauma.”
“The opera piece is quite uncomfortable now with the genocide that is going on in Gaza,” said Sansour. “We actually worked on it in 2020, so it wasn’t something that we kind of predicted, but it is obviously a response to what is happening in Palestine.”
Sansour grew up in Palestine and recounted experiencing the military occupation firsthand. “What we are seeing right now is what has been happening for almost 80 years, so it doesn’t come out of nowhere that we would come up with an opera that is about proleptic mourning,” she said.
The exhibition’s second film, “In Vitro,” is featured in a small room behind curtains. It is an Arabic-language science fiction film, shown as two projections playing side-by-side, simultaneously.
“It’s very much about an apocalypse,” said Sansour. “It’s seeing Palestine as a microcosm for disasters to happen if things are allowed to go the way they are going now.” Sasnour described the irony of having to go into lockdown after “In Vitro” premiered in 2019, as the film centers around a large eco-disaster. “It was quite a strange way of predicting something that we all of a sudden, overnight, found ourselves in.”
The last segment of the exhibition is a large sculptural installation featuring several tree trunks hung over a black reflection pool. The piece’s label describes how the sculpture echoes a scene from the exhibition’s first film “As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night.”
The artists discussed the relevance of the exhibition, especially as President Donald Trump called for an American seizure of Gaza while hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House this Tuesday.
“One of our earlier works is a depiction of Palestine confined to a single skyscraper with every city on each floor and the Palestinian population all housed in the skyscraper,” said Lind. “I got a text from a curator we’re working with this very morning in light of Trump’s announcements last night. He said, ‘Well, it turns out your fiction from 2012 has now become a documentary.’”
“Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales” is on display at the Emerson Media Art Gallery until March 22.
