Onassis AiR | Screening of "Moonscape" and "Tomorrow Again" by Mona Benyamin

This evening kickstarts a new initiative of Onassis AiR as part of which previous and current fellows are invited to contribute to the programming by recommending and coordinating events, talks, screenings, visits, workshops and more.
For this first event of the series, the Onassis AiR fellow Anastasia Diavasti proposes a screening night featuring two short films by Mona Benyamin followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

Mona Benyamin (b.1997) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Palestine. In her works, she explores intergenerational outlooks on hope, trauma, and different temporalities. Through appropriating formats from mass and popular media and tampering with their apparatuses, and utilizing dark humor, she questions notions of authenticity and veracity, and challenges concepts of agency and victimhood. Her recent works have been screened — among others — at MoMA, REDCAT, Sheffield DocFest, The Mosaic Rooms, and Columbia University.

"Moonscape", film, Single-channel video, 17 mins, Mona Benyamin, 2020

Moonscape* is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle of the road song, performed as a duet between a male and female singer, in Arabic. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons, and makes a connection between his story and that of the director's – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible.

The visuals of the film are a hybrid of surrealist scenes from the Arab music industry, reenacted by the artist’s parents who also play the roles of the singers in the film, and film noir; in addition to found footage from the NASA archives, references from canonic films which influenced the art world and show representations of the Moon, and screenshots of Email correspondences with staff members of the Lunar Embassy. All in order to explore the relationship between hope, nostalgia and despair.

*A moonscape is an area or vista of the lunar landscape (generally of the Earth's moon), or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term "moonscape" is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war, often by shelling.

"Tomorrow, again", film, Single-channel video, 11 mins, Mona Benyamin, 2023

Tomorrow, again stages a dysfunctional news broadcast consisting of different segments which recreate and react to various prominent daily catastrophes from Palestine. Instead of a spoken narrative, the film resorts to exaggerated emotional and physical displays, and utilises fragmented and often conflicting testimonies, doppelgängers, and a surrealist visual language to appeal to notions of truth and fiction, and different temporalities.

The cast of the film sees two protagonists, the artist’s parents, assume multiple identities – from presenters to reportage subjects, to eyewitnesses – resulting in a mobius loop where they are the objects, the spectators, and the medium, who narrate and consume their own stories in an endless cycle. It explores the phenomena of mutism resultant from trauma, and the cognitive distortions which come from living in a constant state of emergency; and what happens to urgency when it becomes timeless.