Your Ghosts Are Mine at Palazzo Franchetti is a comprehensive, immersive, and innovative narrative where cinema and video installations merge to explore the contemporary human condition.
The lights go out at Palazzo Franchetti, a triumph of Venetian neo-Gothic architecture, which, on the occasion of the 60th Biennale Arte, welcomes into the darkness of its halls the ghosts of Your Ghosts Are Mine, a totalizing, immersive, and innovative story where cinema and video installations merge to explore the contemporary human condition. Through excerpts from forty video works promoted by the Doha Film Institute and prestigious institutions such as Qatar Museums and the Arab Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition adds to the chorus of “Strangers Everywhere,” offering the Venetian and global audience a new perspective on the ever-changing universe of Arab culture, rarely represented in the West but rich with suggestions capable of transcending geographic and national boundaries. These ghosts will guide us through the ten sections of the exhibition, where stories of ordinary life mingle with the ambiguity of dreams in a perpetual dance of light and shadow.
The journey begins in the desert, a metaphysical place strongly symbolized in Arab literature as an ambivalent symbol of change and eternity. Here, man is called to lose himself in the mirage to reach another dimension, but also to remember his roots, as shown in the works 143 Sahara Street and Land of Dreams, where the dunes become ancestral keepers of civilization. Beyond the silent stretches of sand, ruins emerge, witnesses to a shattered past and impending devastation, while fires blaze in the distance, symbols of resistance and rebirth, whose flames become metaphors for inevitable transformation. However, the path of metamorphosis is arduous, requiring the crossing of one’s own boundaries, as narrated in Ghost Hunting and Ceuta’s Gate, which capture the fear and isolation of those forced to flee their homeland. The exodus is followed by exile, represented in the eponymous section, where, creating a space between the country of origin and the one of residence, the sorrowful condition of the stateless is revealed, suspended between the long shadows of the past and the blinding lights of the present.
Even those who remain must pay a heavy price: the sixth section features stories of seemingly ordinary women from Turkey, Libya, Morocco, Iran, Algeria, Cambodia, and Egypt, who, despite the numbness of daily life, find the strength to achieve independence. But what fate awaits these individuals and communities who abandon their traditions in the hope of a new existence? The answer comes from director Sophia Al-Maria, whose work, centered on the progressive isolation caused by capitalism, unveils the true face of Western society, suffocated by consumerism and incapable of providing a better future. Once the illusions fall, there is nothing left but to look back: drawing from a visual archive of lost memories, the “Ghost” section resurrects vernacular and fragmentary cinematic images, ghosts of a distant past and omens of an increasingly uncertain future, condensed into the fantastic utopias of the “Cosmo” section. A final mirage concludes this long journey, transporting us into the memories of artist Hassan Khan, who evokes the streets of Cairo through the nocturnal image of two men abandoned to the insistent rhythm of the shaabi. Hypnotized by the dance, we can only identify with these and other ghosts, eternally trapped inside the camera and yet destined to live forever, like shadows, in the memory of those who observe them.
