HD single channel video, 12'49'', 2025
In this video work, Alaa Abu Asad re-edits a pornographic film he found online in 2012. When he first watched it, he noticed how the Arab body was portrayed by a white French filmmaker and his Western gaze. He realised that the film exposes an image industry shaped by colonial histories and sustained by the persistence of white male power. Images of lust appear tinted by domination, fantasy, and exoticism. Abu Asad was reminded of the orientalist theories he once studied and decided to interlace them into a new edit of the same film. Yet he does not present them as mere critique.
As the film unfolds, it turns toward something more tender. A softer voice searches for warmth and belonging, for something beyond injustice and othering. It finds light between image transitions, in the dazzling sun reflecting on white stones. The voice, both visual and spoken, carries a sense of home. It lingers in garments swaying in the souk, in narrow alleys and steep stairs, in waves breaking against the shore, in the scent of jasmine behind a window, in the faces of passersby.
The voice does not turn away from desire. It looks at the sculpted bodies of men, their glowing skin, the moments where attraction glides over muscle and sweat, as if reclaiming what history never allowed to surface. Through these gestures of montage, the work restores a place and a pleasure once seized and stolen.
Rawad Baaklini for Sun, Don’t Rush to be Red. Son, Don’t Rush to be Read, TENT, Rotterdam
