The videos of Mona Benyamin combine elements of slapstick comedy, family melodrama and commercial aesthetics to offer a layered response to the Palestinian experience and the ongoing tragedies of the greater region. Tomorrow, again (2023) takes the form of a generic newscast, at once familiar and timeless, in order to convey the feeling of an ongoing state of emergency. The tragic and absurd undertones of the film speak to the complicated links between complicity, viewership and authorship. The sense of exaggeration and absurd emotional responses in the film collapse satire and critique, capturing the quintessentially Palestinian condition of misrepresentation and silencing.
What is an adequate emotional response to the traumatic history of Palestine? The film’s carefully calibrated visual language questions the continuity of trauma and the persistence of a constant state of emergency by presenting hysterical laughter as a last-ditch mode of expression and grief.
EXHIBITED WORKS
Mona Benyamin (b. 1997)
Tomorrow, again, 2023
Single-channel video, 16:9, colour, 11 min, stereo
Commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms/A.M. Qattan Foundation
Courtesy of the artist
