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