Hello Guggenheim is a four-week program of diverse films and videos that are united in their mistrust of inherited narratives about history and documentation, testimony and voice. By turns fantastical and irreverent, adversarial and contrived, the assembled works provide an unusual and uniquely compelling vantage onto the veracity politics of the moving image.
Deploying a wide range of narrative and cinematic techniques, many of the works in Hello Guggenheim evoke epochal historical events as both tragedy and farce. Parviz Kimiavi’s cult masterpiece O.K. Mister (1978) reimagines British Oil exploitation in Iran as an absurd pop satire, while Wael Shawky’s Telematch Sadat (2007) and Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle’s The Goodness Regime (2013) use children to restage the assassination of the Egyptian president and the signing of the Oslo Accords, respectively. Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman’s mass media montage epic Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990) chronologically reconstructs representations of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict using Hollywood film, network news, and cartoons.

Hassan Khan’s Bind Ambition (2012) gives the impression of reality in the streets of Cairo, but constantly reminds us of its cinematic mediation by rebuffing ambient sound for studio voice recordings. In Neïl Beloufa’s Untitled (2010), the artist probes a rumor about a house near Algiers. The set of the film is comprised of a series of full-scale inkjet prints, photographed and used to wallpaper a life-sized model of the house. In Mounira Al Solh’s Paris Without a Sea (2007-8) the artist’s voice is superimposed over those of her interviewees: a group of men who swim daily at the beaches of Beirut.

Hello Guggenheim closes with four screenings of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Salam Cinema (1994)—the program’s namesake—which explores the power dynamics between author and subject by chronicling auditions held after an open casting call. The director mercilessly taunts, bullies, and manipulates his would-be actors, pitting friends and relatives against one another (“The one that cries the fastest knows the most about love”) and evading responsibility for his mind games (“It’s the camera that’s so cruel”). But subjects often resist; one brutalized teenage girl throws one of his testy questions back at him (“Would you rather be an artist or a humane person?”).

Similarly, in Cinema Fouad (1994), Mohamed Soueid’s never-before-screened-in-the-United-States cinéma vérité portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman, his subject refuses Soueid’s more goading questions (“what is your favorite part of your body?”) with artful resistance: “my whole body.” In Azin Feizabadi’s quasi-autobiographical Cryptomnesia (2014), the memories and experiences of a narrator and his proxy fall in and out of alignment.

Participating artists: Azin Feizabadi, Hassan Khan, Iman Issa, Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman, Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle, Mohamed Soueid, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mounira Al Solh, Neïl Beloufa, Parviz Kimiavi, Rokni Haerizadeh, Wael Shawky