C Magazine
The Image Remains the Same by Ali El-Darsa: Text
Guest curated by Joyce Joumaa
Artist Project, Issue 161: Stop!
Fall 2025, Canada
Read Online
Excerpt from Editorial statement
by Maandeeq Mohamed & Joy Xiang
“Romanova’s writing on the importance of “reformulating and unpacking the mechanisms of colonial perception” resonates with wider critiques of empire in this issue’s Artist Project. 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.”
Text: Before we were Berliners
Available upon request
August 2025
Upcoming
Schloss Solitude Fellowship
Stuttgart, Germany
2025–2026
Reading
By Ali El-Darsa
27.07.2025, 4pm
With Sanna Helena Berger, Aglaia Brändli, Reece Cox, Olga Hohmann, sgp
By Oxfordberlin at Scriptings
badnām film festival
atta galatta, bangalore, india
The Image Remains the Same
April 24-26, 2025
@badnamfilmfestival
Transmediale 2025
(near) near but — far:
A Closing Conversation
02.02.2025, 18:00
Miriam Makeba Auditorium
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
Live Streaming + Tickets
Wi ith சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah), Asia Bazdyrieva, Chris Lee, Luiza Prado, Jas Rault, T.L. Cowan, Ali El-Darsa, مشترى هلال Moshtari Hilal
Toronto Queer Film Festival
The Image Remains the Same
End of March
Tranzac club,
292 Brunswick Ave
Toronto
tqff.ca