26 August: screening of “Black Bach Artsakh” by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
- Published on Wednesday, 25 August 2021 12:22
Thursday, 26th of August, 9pm, screening of “Black Bach Artsakh” (2021) by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri. The screening is part of the exhibition Sensible Grounds: Tuning Into the Rhythms of the Chronic, curated by Azar Mahmoudian.
Black Bach Artsakh is the name of a world. It lives in and as a film. Those who view it not only inhabit it, but also care for it, and keep it alive by keeping watch over it. In this way, it is not a film which so much resists the makers of war and those who deny and continue to justify genocide; it is a film which outlives them.
If film is a document, then it bears witness to a place and a time. For example: this film remembers events from a place called Artsakh in the year 2007—a middle point—exactly 13 years after the 1994 cessation of hostilities in the struggle for liberation and self-determination by Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian inhabitants, and 13 years before the 2020 invasion by Azerbaijan’s dictator, who enlisted Turkey’s military and several thousand mercenaries from Syria to conquer those same lands as his country’s sovereign domain.
Film as testament, which this film claims affinity with, is what unsettles the domain or reign of any sovereign or sovereignty. It inhabits a time, which is neither the linear one of history nor the make-believe one of fiction, but what some refer to as that of the eternal. For this, and rightly so, Johann Sebastian Bach plays in the soundtrack. Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri.
The programme at NAC is part of the project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, a European Cooperation project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the EU and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.