I wake from history, alive

In the framework of the exhibition I wake from history, alive, TAVROS will be organising a series of public talks, guided tours and events.

Programme

Thursday 17 October, 19:00 Artist talk by Ala Younis

In 2006, US military intelligence cameras recorded the movements of American soldiers during the Battle of Haifa Street in Baghdad in Iraq. While soldiers were breaking into the apartments of high-rise buildings or hiding behind arches, the city’s contemporary landmarks appeared in the background of the images of the streets where Iraqi fighters were once stationed. The houses that were broken into had never been exhibited in this way before, even though their plans had been shown in international magazines when they were designed by international architecture firms in the eighties. The architecture in Haifa Street was a conceptual prototype, a demonstration of the possibilities of a unique aesthetic discourse whose influence would seep, with its architects, from Baghdad to the rest of the region. The housing blocks were named after the nationality of the companies contracted to build them, and the blocks were entirely dedicated to a single type of resident. The 540 Dutch apartments were allocated to academics, the 400 German apartments were allocated to Syrian political dissidents who had taken refuge in Iraq, and the buildings in the first part of the project were allocated to government employees. The American cameras not only filmed their soldiers’ attacks but also depicted the residents in a single light – as terrorists. Today, pictures of these houses can be found on many real estate websites, allowing us to imagine how much it would cost to own one in a slowly recovering Baghdad. This presentation will attempt to imagine four decades collapsed as one, from the military, artistic and architectural images of the street and the temporary exhibits that came up on it in these different times.

Friday 15 November, 19:00 “The houses I had they took away from me”, Lecture-performance by Arie Amaya-Akkermans

Lecture-performance on photography, memory, the archaeological imagination and disaster. The lecture follows the traces of a lost photographic archive, consisting mainly of documentation from archaeological excavations in Turkey and Cyprus, during a time of intense upheaval in the region, coinciding with the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes. The lecture looks at a number of works by modern archaeologists such as Dan Hicks and Jennifer Baird, re-thinking the meaning of photographic objects, practices and imaginaries in archaeology, and the production of time that takes place in archaeological photography, against the background of artworks by Ala Younis, Vangelis Vlahos, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Gregory Bucakjian and Leyla Cardenas. The lecture-performance contextualizes both artistic practice and archaeological theory, through a highly personal contemporary narrative, taking place between Antakya and Athens, moving forwards and backwards in historical time, seeking speculative temporalities. The title is borrowed from Giorgos Seferis’ poem “Thrush”, written in 1946.

Alternative history tours

Saturday 30 November, 17:00 tour with Theodoros Chiotis (poet, philologist)

Saturday 7 December, 17:00 tour Vassiliki Christou (Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the Law School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

Saturday 11 January, 17:00 tour with Alkisti Efthymiou (filmmaker, researcher)

Friday 17 January, 19:00 tour with Vangelis Karamanolakis (Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Department of History and Archaeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

In this exhibition, Vangelis Vlahos, through his work An Index of No Events, proposes a kind of timeline of political events, or rather, “no-events” from the post-dictatorship period. As part of the public program, TAVROS invites theorists, legal experts, and artists to create alternative guided tours, approaching these events from their own perspective or suggesting “events or no-events” that they would define as critical to a personal, alternative timeline. This is an open tour process, emphasising the creative engagement of participants with the timeline and its events in a non-linear way, aiming to shape a multi-dimensional perception of time and history, where the personal and the collective are dynamically interconnected.

Wednesday 4 December, 20:00 Archives and Apparitions Film Screening

Program Duration: 80 minutes
Followed by a discussion with Rami el Sabbagh, Vartan Avakian, and Nour Ouayda. Moderation: Eirini Fountedaki

In dialogue with the exhibition I wake from history, alive, this programme, curated by Nour Ouayda, examines the interplay between archival images, memory, and manipulation. Filmmaker Rania Stephan once noted, “The archive never arrives to us alone.” Each encounter with archival material is accompanied by a spark that reverberates through every subsequent interaction. The four films presented explore the dynamic space between the revelation of archival material and its transformation, negotiating with the blinding light that emanates from its presence.

Film programme:

The Video Story by Vartan Avakian
2015 | 17’ | Arabic and English
Based on a family’s home video archive, the film reflects on the profound changes in their relationship to reality and fantasy after the introduction of a VHS camera in 1983.

Towards the Sun by Nour Ouayda
2019 | 17’ | Arabic with English subtitles
Set in the National Museum of Beirut, this film combines evocative narration with a sensory journey through archaeological objects and the site’s layered histories.

Topology of an Absence by Rami el Sabbagh & Sharif Sehanoui
2021 | 30’ | No dialogue
A collaboration of music and film utilizing archival footage from 1920s Lebanon, reflecting on the anonymous figures both behind and in front of the camera.

Archive of the Future by Giorgio Bassil
2023 | 16’ | Arabic with English subtitles
Through testimonies, individuals describe visions of a distant world seen after encountering mysterious objects containing white contact lenses.

Saturday 14 December, 17:00 exhibition tour with Maria-Thalia Carras

Maria-Thalia Carras, curator of I wake from history, alive, will share her curatorial vision and thinking behind the exhibition, along with her ways of reading Ala Younis’ and Vangelis Vlahos’ works.