How are filmmakers and artists working on de-colonizing narratives? How does de-colonizing narratives contribute to the political agency in oppressive countries. We speak to three different artists and academics in the field to see how the topic of resistance through visual arts is tackled in their home countries.

For this session we have invited Dalia Al-Kury, a Research fellow at The Norwegian Film School, to host the event.
Dalia is a hybrid documentary filmmaker currently researching the concept of Futuring Documentary, where she explores how creative documentary can benefit from a fictional futuristic setting, in order to highlight current dystopias. She is currently working on developing a speculative docu-fiction mini-series to explore this.

Our speakers are:

Tanya Habjouqa is a documentary filmmaker that brings politics and creative vision into the same frame. Born in Jordan and raised between Texas and the Middle East with a focus on gender, identity, and socio-political issues in the Middle East, there is always a layer of gravitas and an intuitive sense of metaphor beneath her work. Habjouqa takes on a series-based approach, immersed in research and interlaying journalistic, academic, conceptual and documentary practices.
Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Carnegie Museum of art. Habjouqa is represented by East Wing Gallery in Doha, Qatar.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. He heads the international research group CoFUTURES. Chattopadhyay is the leader (PI) of two major research projects funded by the European and Norwegian Research Councils, which explore contemporary global futurisms movements from a transmedial perspective, including literature, film, visual arts, and games. Chattopadhyay runs the Holodeck, a state of the art games research lab at UiO. He is also an Imaginary College Fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. His research website is: https://cofutures.org.

Patrick Brock is a doctoral research fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of the University of Oslo. He is a member of the European Research Council project “CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents”. His research is particularly concerned with the Afrofuturism movement in Brazil and its implications for cultural production and regeneration, racial identity, and resistance to authoritarianism. Study objects include books, films, videogames and artworks. Patrick holds a BA in Communication from UFBA (Brazil) and an MA in English Literature from CUNY. In parallel to the academic track, Patrick developed a career as a reporter, journalistic translator, and editor.

Host Dalia
Ar cafe presentation slide 02 M Vtrans