Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018 — The Sound of Screens Imploding — Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève

Rosarium

(Saudi Arabia/Switzerland · 2018 · 10 min · English and Arabic, English subtitles)
For Rosarium, Sarah Abu Abdallah works in collaboration with Saudi filmmaker Reem al-Bayyat. The film tackles crying and shedding tears in both the romanticist and the ritualistic sense. The star of the film is the actress Rana Alamuddin, who we follow around her house as she attempts with resilience to resist the everyday through the act of crying. What at first appears to be a perfect household turns out to be a hallucination that unravels as the film goes on.

Sarah Abu Abdallah works across a variety of media including video, installation, poetry and images. Her work creates speculative spaces and assembles narratives colored by the absurdity and awkwardness found in the mundane.