This series of screenings unfolds over two evenings, as well as a keynote by scholar Tammer El-Sheikh on June 19, 2026 at 6pm. A Q&A between the curator and the public will take place after each screening.
June 17th – 7pm
June 19th – 6:30pm
What can an image still do when the world collapses? What power remains in the visual when states erase, archives lie, and silence in the face of genocide becomes policy? An Image Before Last gathers a constellation of film and video essays that reclaim the image—not only as document or evidence, but as resistance. Refusing the flattening logics of history and spectacle, these works attempt to repurpose erasure itself, forging a language of refusal.
Set between Lebanon and Palestine, the essays are not selected for being bound by geography, but by a shared condition: the impossibility of representing catastrophe without reinforcing it. Across these works, we encounter not only what is shown, but also what is withheld—what resurfaces despite destruction. Here, artists are no longer in search of truth through representation, for representation itself has become impossible. The frame becomes a site of sabotage, where presence, existence, and agency are often asserted through withdrawal—through the broken image, through its capacity to mourn, to disrupt, to bear witness when both language and law fail.
For Lebanese thinker and artist Jalal Toufic, in the wake of what he calls a “surpassing disaster” [1], artists must move beyond mourning or documentation. They must act as mediums, recovering what has withdrawn into latency, and reopening the conditions for tradition, memory, and meaning to re-emerge in unforeseen forms. For artist and writer Walid Sadek, to “see with blindness” is to recognize that some things cannot—or should not—be brought fully into light. It is an ethics and aesthetics of restraint, working against the grain of spectacle, evidence, and transparency. Looking with blind eyes suggests that, after such violence, the visible is no longer trustworthy—that to “see” is often to misread, overclaim, or participate in denial. Sadek’s concept invites us to rethink the image not as revelation, but as a space where violence is neither fully seen nor resolved, but held in suspension.
Drawing on Toufic’s and Sadek’s propositions, the screening program presents works where the image is not what is seen, but what is activated through the refusal of closure, the refusal of testimony. These are works that tirelessly explore what else the image might do—fragmented, persistent, and working, even in vain, to reconstitute language itself. A different grammar of resistance.
[1] Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009).
Schedule:
June 17th, 2026 →
Café-bar opens: 6:30pm
Start: 7pm
Yazan Khalili – On love and other landscapes (7 mins)
Noor Abed – Our songs were ready for all wars to come (20 mins)
Batoul Faour – The bunker, the barracks, and the base (17 mins)
break
Kamal Aljafari – A Fidai film (78 mins)
June 19th, 2026 →
Caf-bar opens: 6pm
Start: 6:30pm
Opening speech + keynote by Tammer El Sheikh (20 mins)
Q&A (15 mins)
break
Ghinwa Yassine – A Dream Pointing to Aadchit (17 mins)
Maissa Maatouk – Floating lights I: Fall of the state (4 mins)
Maissa Maatouk – Floating lights II: Rise of corporations (11 mins)
break
Ghassan Salhab – No Title (40 mins)
Walid Raad – I only wish that I could weep (7 mins)
Q&A (15 mins)
ABOUT+
Lynn Kodeih is an artist and researcher working between Beirut and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal since 2020. Her practice engages with the politics of the image, examining space and borders within the ongoing colonial context. Through textuality and textuality and auto-theory, video and installation, her practice explores materiality, accident, and the impossibility of representation. Grounded in an intersectional perspective, she brings to light power dynamics and systemic violence. Since 2009, she collaborates with various universities and artistic institutions; she conceives the curatorial gesture as an extension of her practice: a space to test her concerns in resonance with the work of engaged creators.
Tammer El-Sheikh is an Associate Professor of Art History at York University in Toronto. His scholarly publications have focused on contemporary art in the MENA/SWANA region and its diasporas. He has written feature articles and reviews for Parachute, C Magazine, ETC Magazine, Canadian Art, and BlackFlash, and essays for a number of exhibition catalogues both in Canada and abroad. His academic writing has appeared in the journals ARTMargins and Arab Studies Journal, and his first edited volume, titled “Hybrid Bodies: An Anthology of Writings on Art, Identity, and Intercorporeality,” was released in the spring of 2020. El-Sheikh was an editorial resident with Public Parking in 2025.
Ghassan Salhab was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1958. In addition to making his own films, he collaborates on various scenarios and teaches film in Lebanon. He has directed 9 full-length films: Beyrouth Fantôme, Terra Incognita, The Last Man, 1958, The Mountain, The Valley, An open Rose/Warda, The river and Contretemps/ Day is night … in addition to numerous “essays”, including (Posthumous), Chinese ink, Son Image, and Le voyage immobile, with Mohamed Soueid. La Rochelle International Film Festival, JCC Carthage, La Cinémathèque du Québec, Festival internacional de cine Guanajuato, Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris and le Cinéma du Réel made a tribute to his work. He has also published different texts and articles in various magazines, and two books: fragments du Livre du naufrage and à contre-jour.
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist. His films have screened at major festivals and museums, including Locarno, London, Viennale, and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo. He has received prestigious awards from FIDMarseille, Pesaro, and Visions du Réel. In 2024, IndieLisboa hosted a full retrospective of his work. Aljafari has taught at The New School and DFFB in Berlin and was a Film Study Center fellow at Harvard. Currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he is developing “Beirut 1931,” a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.
Walid Raad is, in part, an artist and a Professor of Photography at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA). The list of exhibitions (good, bad and mediocre ones); awards and grants (merited, not merited, grateful for, rejected and/or returned); education (some of it thought-provoking; some of it, less so); publications (I am fond of some of my books, but more so of the books of Jalal Toufic. You can find his here: jalaltoufic.com), can be found somewhere online.
Ghinwa Yassine is an anti-disciplinary artist, art educator, and cultural producer based on the land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people, so-called Vancouver. Her work uses various media, including film, installation, performance, text, and drawing. She was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, worked in Dubai and London, studied in the Netherlands, and moved to Vancouver in 2017. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in the Netherlands, Lebanon, UAE, Canada, Iran, and Croatia. Ghinwa has an extensive background in education, brand design and strategy, project management, and event planning and production, and is currently in the role of co-executive director with MENA.
Batoul Faour is an architect and visual artist. Her work operates at the intersection of politics, spatial histories, and media – blending a journalistic, documentary approach with the empirical and the architectural. These are methods she is interested in employing within and around dimensions of colonialism, migration and displacement, state and occupational violence, infrastructures, and other power systems. She is a recipient of the 2021 Avery Review Essay Prize for her research on glass in the aftermath of the Beirut explosion. She holds a MArch from the University of Toronto where she was previously an instructor, and a BArch from the American University of Beirut, where she currently teaches.
Maissa Maatouk is an artist living and working in Beirut. She graduated with degrees in product and global design from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), Beirut (BA, 2014; MA, 2017). Her recent projects tackle perception during the recent Lebanese collapse. She was a 2019–2020 fellow in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut and has been a resident at the Junge Akademie (Akademie der Künste) (2022), Saradar Foundation (2023), and Akademie Schloss Solitude (2023). She has shown her work in Lebanon, USA, Germany, Austria, and France. Her most recent video work, Floating Lights, was part of the exhibition Foreshadows, curated by Reem Shadid at the Beirut Art Center (2024).
Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine and The Netherlands. He is a researcher, artist, and cultural producer. His practice frames landscapes, institutions, and social and technological phenomena as politicized entities. He was the director of Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah (2015–2019), and he co-founded different platforms of infrastructures for cultural practices, The Question of Funding in 2019, and Radio Alhara in 2020. He is currently a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam. Noor Abed (Palestine) works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, searching through the connection between ‘synchrony’ and social action. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. Her book Stars at Midday was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024.
Credits+
Curator: Lynn Kodeih
Artists: Yazan Khalili, Noor Abed, Batoul Faour, Kamal Aljafari, Maissa Maatouk, Ghinwa Yassine, Ghassan Salhab, Walid Raad