GPP Slidefest, an event founded in Dubai by Gulf Photo Plus, is an evening of inspiring photography presentations by artists around a central theme. Each photographer takes the stage for 5/7mins to share their photography series followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Since its inception over a decade ago, GPP has held over 30 of these Slidefest evenings and have presented them in Cairo, Jeddah, Riyadh and Bahrain.
GPP and SAFAR Film Festival are teaming up to present the first ever Slidefest in the UK. Presented as a pre-festival event at ICA, each artist will share work inspired by this year’s festival theme, A Journey Through Space and Time.
21 June at 7pm at the ICA. Presenters include:
Laura El-Tantawy
Beyond Here Is Nothing is a meditation on home. A place of belonging, a tranquil state of mind; a nostalgic memory or an imaginary destination – home is a perpetual possibility I am journeying to reach. My personal experience growing up in contrasting cultures is the window to this intimate & emotive visual exploration of the unsettling feeling of rootlessness, the mental burden of loneliness & the constant search for belonging in unfamiliar places. Drifting between the physical & the whimsical, the series reveals itself through layers of images & words – a mirror of dispositions brought to life in a three dimensional book. A living object harmonising with time.
Ala Buisir
Survivors of The War on Terror is a product of comparison of both H-Block prisoners of 1976-1981 and recently released Guantanamo Bay prisoners. I have conducted this research in order to show the inhumane criminalisation they had endured. The interviews were based on their time in prison and in order to respect their confidentiality, their identities were not shown. I have also hidden their identities in order to eradicate stereotypes of which prisoner is which, this would furthermore highlight the similarities without the names. I had a personal push to undertake this project as I feel like what happens in the past still happens today and will forever happen. I have presented this by the extreme similarities between the H-Block survivors that happened decades ago and the Guantanamo Bay survivors which were very recent.
Lina Geoushy
Shame Less is a documentary investigation of the matrix surrounding violence against women in Egypt. It aims at untangling the various factors and settings connected to gender-based violence: workplaces, homes, religion, the justice system, and the media, exposing the nuances of the worldviews and contexts that have culminated in the dismissal, normalization, or enactment of this violence.
Samar Hazboun
Errant Doves is a project exploring the emotional states of queer Palestinians, shunned by their families and unable to return home following the COVID-19 pandemic. The ongoing economic suffering and overcrowding in shelters as a result of the health crisis, exacerbated the already imminent threats of violence that Palestinians navigate on a daily basis. The series was produced in clandestine conditions, featuring the intimate stories of anonymous Palestinian youth retold by Hazboun.
Dia Mrad
Utilities seeks to excavate and document the multilayers of Beirut’s economic collapse and employs an ethnographic lens to explore the material manifestations of the crisis across the city’s urban fabric. The project unearths the material infrastructural apparatus that is emerging as a response to socioeconomic conditions; solar panels, water tanks, private generators, and prison-like façades of banks are all elementary fragments of this apparatus.
Sana Badri
Sana will be presenting work from her projects documenting London communities as well as a street studio series that she did as part of an alternative arts education with young people from the Church St. community in North London.
© Image credit: Laura El-Tantawy, Beyond Here is Nothing.