The Markaz Review:

On Sunday October 20, the Instants Vidéo festival in Marseille welcomed the Biennale d’art vidéo palestinienne en exil. It was an opportunity for five Palestinian artists, from Jerusalem, the West Bank or survivors of the hell of Gaza, to meet and reflect on their role, as the genocidal war continues in Palestine.

Nina Hubinet

The mildness of one Sunday in October drove many Marseillais towards the sea or the hills surrounding the city. A hundred or so people, however, decided to spend this sunny afternoon at the Friche la Belle-de-Mai, the former tobacco factory that has become one of Marseille’s central cultural venues. Passing under the Module, a sort of concrete spaceship on stilts, we reach the Seita room, in front of which a few people are chatting over coffee. “Today it’s impossible to dissociate oneself from politics: everything is political, what we eat, where we live… An artist who doesn’t take a stand is in itself a political act,” says a young woman. “That’s your point of view, but some artists simply don’t want to say anything about the society around them,” reacts a man in his fifties. “For me, my very existence is political,” retorts his interlocutor, clearly incredulous.

The tone is set: the programming and exchanges at this Biennial of Palestinian Video Art in Exile, hosted at La Friche by Marseille’s Instants Vidéo festival, will be permeated by the question of the place of artists in the world. What can art still say, show and express, after a year of massacres in Palestine?

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