AlKury’s doctoral thesis, 'Imagining Liberation', is a practice-based artistic research project conducted in the PhD programme Artistic Research in Film and Related Audiovisual Art Forms at the Norwegian Film School at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences.
– In the project, I am staging my own return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming. It includes grievances over the historical and present witnessing of settler-colonial violence and the ethnic cleansing of my people, as well as personal lived experiences of the loss of a homeland, AlKury writes to inn.no.
The interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries, and then staging speculations of futures during her doctoral practice-based research, stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world she hopes possible.
– Both practices – staging in documentary and speculative non-fiction – are deeply rooted in posing the question: 'what if?' to offer another possible world or narrative. My work combines these approaches in the realisation of my own method in speculative multitemporal non-fiction, AlKury explains.
The screening will showcase her short films, video diaries, and narrative experiments throughout the research. When returning to Palestine, Dalia runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of 'others', and the role of cinematic catharsis.
When asked to explain the significance of her film practice in a greater sense, AlKury states the following:
– I try to engage politically with the world by giving voice to subjects affected by war and other oppressive situations. My contribution to the field of hybrid filmmaking explores how staging fantasies and aspirations of the disenfranchised documentary subjects can respond to their desperate need for justice and reparations. I explore themes of decoloniality and emancipatory ways of building an image which could empower stagnant stories through different speculative non-fiction narrative tools.
Main process of the doctoral work:
AlKury states that what is important in speculative non-fiction is that, once an artist has done film work that confronts the unfavourable realities and reimagined alternative futures, the world begins to feel more hopeful. To familiarise the possibility of a better world is to bring it one step closer and can also indirectly critique the status quo.
Here are the precise steps taken to create her multi-temporal, multi-genre artwork that demand a more hopeful reality:
- Find the theme.
- Find the person that personifies that theme (sometimes they find you).
- Establish the ‘facts’ of that theme with the person.
- Throw away the facts and imagine how things can work better, in an ideal scenario.
- Write the imagined scenarios and find moments of truth and beauty.
- Abstract it from words and dialogue, and turn it into an emotion, preferably a complex emotion.
- Meditate on this emotion (with the subject and alone, i.e., through your preferred artistic method).
- Create a visual picture or tableaux in which the essence of that emotion becomes visual.
- Film it and allow enough room so that it redirects you or the character, hopefully illuminating a deeper truth.
Contact information:
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