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.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Mona Benyamin (b. 1997, Haifa) is a visual artist, filmmaker and cellist who lives and works between Haifa and New York. Her work explores intergenerational experiences of dispossession and the construction and transmission of memories, focusing on the interplay between witnessing, trauma and temporal consciousness. By appropriating formats from mass media, tampering with their apparatuses, utilising dark humour and collaborating with her immediate surroundings and her parents, Benyamin creates films and narratives where surrealism and hyperrealism seem to collide. Her works have been part of the 6th Art Encounters Biennial,Timișoara (2025); SCREEN MEMORIES, Abrons Arts Center and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York (2025); Constellations of Multiple Wishes: Along the Eastern Horizon, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), Ljubljana (2024); In the shade of the sun, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2023).
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
