The Image Remains the Same by Ali El-Darsa: Text
Guest curated by Joyce Joumaa
Artist Project, Issue 161: Stop!
15 August 2025
Read Online or Pick up the magazine here
Excerpt from Editorial statement by Maandeeq Mohamed & Joy Xiang: “This issue opens with previously unreleased film stills from Ali El-Darsa’s The Image Remains the Same (2024), which depict Lebanon’s El-Mina port as it overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. In the accompanying essay, guest curator Joyce Joumaa writes: “The same Mediterranean that once brought European colonizers, traders, and armies to our shores now carries populations displaced by the enduring effects of that same imperial intervention.” Joumaa further offers that “Ali’s investigation goes deeper than documentation,” as he interrogates how memory crystallizes into document, and how lived experience becomes archived imagery. (Thank you Joyce Joumaa & José Morbàn).
Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart
Selected by Sehr Jalil, Rheim Alkadhi and Renan Laru-an
Ali El-Darsa works across moving image, installation, performance, and sound. His practice examines structures of belonging in transnational contexts, foregrounding the specificity of time-based media in creating networked, mediated memories and cultural imaginaries.
His interdisciplinary research in performance engages with the fields of text, word, sign, and language, questioning—often collaboratively—how language shapes movement, systems of thought, and, by extension, the discourse surrounding the interpretation of a work of art, both materially and metaphorically. His work approaches communication through its means, methods, and media—oral, written, or coded—examining the transmission of customary, historical, and contemporary narratives.
El-Darsa lives and works in Berlin, and is a 2025–2026 fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
CV
Contact
studio (at) alieldarsa.com
Studio
Tempelhof, Berlin
Open Solitude
Akademie Schloss Solitude
29 Nov. 2025 / 2 to 10 pm
With Lily Abichaine, Hiba N. Ali, aliveduo, Lukas Beyer, Sanja Bistričić Srića, Julio Cann, Sergiu Diță, Ali El-Darsa, Caroline Douville, Hanieh Fatouraee, Rachel Gill, Jeanette Hunziker, Hiba G. Isleem, Gábor Kristóf, Sara Lana, Rosemary Lee, Anna Lublina, Agnieszka Mastalerz, Kristina Miller, Mert Moralı, José Morbán, Peter Okotor, Matilde Outeiro, Rawlab, Alina Sarnatska, Mauro Suarez Torrico, Noriko Tomita, Aleksander Zain. (Thank you Diana, Eva, Helmut, Sarah and Sophie-Charlotte).
Studio visit with Berlin Art Link
By Johanna Siegler
Studio photos by Olivia Noss.
“Yet, if there is a geography the work advances, it is not the old opposition of origin versus arrival, but the back-and-forth that insists on keeping memory in play, even against the deep-rooted habits of forgetting.”
Ali El-Darsa’s Neukölln studio is sparse and luminous, pared to essentials, deliberate and generous with air. Talking through his background and how it has informed his work, Johanna Siegler visits El-Darsa in his studio, reflecting on making cities legible, dissonance feeling like dissociation, and omissions that read as political. ( Thank you Alison Hugill.)
Ali El-Darsa
Exhibition
13.08.2024–03.09.2024
Diaphanes Berlin, Dresdener Str. 118
Performance-Based Research Presentation
Iteriation III
Tuesday, 13.08.2024 at 6 PM
With Emma Howes and Jao Moon
Playground is an ongoing collaborative performance-based research project that takes form in workshops consisting of individual and group performances, readings, screenings and discussions. Iterations of Playground have been developed and presented in Beirut at Ashkal Alwan (2018) and in Dubai at Alserkal Residency under the title Zwischenspiel (2017), engaging local performers and artists. The project evolves continuously over several years, responding to local settings and experiences while forging spaces for experimentation with local performers and non-performers.
Employing open-ended, collaborative rehearsal strategies, Playground examines movement as written and oral language; as visual and sonic translations. In this iteration of the project, Emma Howes and Jao Moon are asked to examine their bodies as vehicles devoid of affect, capable of performing movement shaped by the conceptual framework and methodology I have set in place—defining form and aesthetics.
Playground opens onto the fields of text, word, sign and languages, both vernacular and through their relationship with the linguistic legacy in Europe. It involves questioning the ways in which language influences thought systems and, by extension, the discourses and interpretations of a work of art, both in its material and metaphorical sense. The research approaches the notion of communication through its means, methods and media, whether oral, written or coded; through the transmission of customary, historical or contemporary stories; and through dialogue, with consideration for the diversity of discursive spaces and how location informs, expands or limits the room for expression.
I am interested in how formal representations manifest and interact with the conceptual framework I have set for the researcher-performers, and how the perception of the audience becomes a crucial agent in this interaction. Playground positions settings and modes of embodied research through rehearsal as a self-contained work of art. For me, these modes, along with the aesthetics they foster, are self-sufficient and independent of conventional modes of exhibition. The methodological process, along with the workshops and presentation space as containers of thought-in-the-making, aims to liberate the research from traditional economies of production. –Ali El-Darsa
Methodology
– We are experiencing a suppression of our voices, fundamentally transforming how we navigate our public and private spheres—how we move, act, belong and care for ourselves as communities.
– Pro-Palestine demonstrations over the last few months in Berlin reveal masses of bodies that are alert, fearful, defiant, angry, cheerful, burnt-out and equally hopeful, all in search of collective strength, agency, transformation and relief. How do our bodies inform our mediated and public spaces, and vice versa? Can we study the transformation of our collective movement over a set period of time as a means to overcome oppression, affect change, and find alternative forms of expression through translation, abstraction and the coded? Where do we start and how do we wrap up, if we can at all?
Howes and Moon reflect on these questions by capturing what is significant and striking to them. Excerpts from their research videos are then indexed to create an archive, from which they collaboratively develop sets of translations using text, image, sound and drawing. They present several iterations from their research, constructing a collective body-based language in real time. Their diverse backgrounds play crucial roles in shaping this research.
Emma Howes oscillates between movement and form to create time-based performance installations that incorporate soft-sculpture, sound, and improvisation with fallible objects. Her transdisciplinary works manifest as multiple reconfigurations of the body and space, informed by a background in dance (ballet, baroque opera, modern, and baguazhang—an internal Chinese martial art), performance theory, and the visual arts within the framework of a conceptual art practice. Her labor is guided by observations of gestures, focusing on speculative scores—compositions that represent a stage in the development from concept and intention to depiction and effect. Buttressed by these graphic systems, Howes creates space for concentrated encounters, or serious play–a process that embraces embodied experience toward the creation of hyper-glitch operas as Cadavre Exquis—chimeras that celebrate comprehensive failure and foster alternative perspectives. Recent solo presentations and upcoming projects include: Critical Shifts, Istanbul, Turkey (2024); Art Museum of Joliette, Quebec, (2024); Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz (2023); ImPulsTanz, Vienna (2023) and the 11th Berlin Biennale, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020). Howes holds a joint MFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and the Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar.
Jao Moon
Team Artistic Director: Ali El-Darsa
Researcher-Performers: Emma Howes and Jao Moon
Producer & Manager: Ali El-Darsa
Gallery Director: Marie Glassl, Diaphanes Berlin
Sound Design: Richy Carey, èist sound
Graphic Design: arc
Sound Technician: Nobutaka Shomura
Videographer: Karam Ghoussein
Photographer: Andreea Dican
Former Researcher-Performers
Beirut, 2018 / Bassam Abou Diab, Ghida Hachicho, Stephanie Kayal, Christel Salem and Corinne Skaff.
Dubai, 2017 / Hened Choueiry, Sandra Egido Ibañez, Vrushali Kulkarni and Isaac Sullivan.
Playground is created with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.