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Content Notes: Sound of drones/ warplanes.
Logline: In Gaza in 2023, evacuation leaflets fall like starlings bearing critical news; a viewer’s shadow joins them, exposing the lethal irony of information in this iteration of the Palestinian genocide.
Synopsis: Starlings : Leaflets (2024) traces the violent paradox of information sharing during this iteration of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza, inflicted by Israeli Occupational Forces. Footage of evacuation leaflets – papers Gazans were forced to chase after despite their lethal unreliability – drifts across the screen like starling murmuration, echoing the birds’ collective movement to share signals of direction and survival. Layered atop one another, the two airborne forms blur into a single unsettling choreography, accompanied by binaural recordings from the streets of Gaza, the drone of warplanes, and the tremendous sound of wings flapping. Lines from Marwan Makhoul’s poem articulate the impossibility of hearing birds in a sky filled with machines of death. As an installation, a visitor’s body enters the projection, splitting and merging the images with their shadow, transforming witnessing into active participation. A companion website exists at www.leaflets.sabamaheen.com.
Artist Bio: Saba Maheen (b.1997 Lawrenceville, GA) is a female, queer, Muslim, Bengali-American, multimodal maker and thinker working with image, reproduction, and participation. Maheen considers portals that break down the dichotomy between print-digital, time-space, and human-computer. Her work tends toward repetition, multiples, editions, versions, iterations, units, modules, and collections, and is fabricated often through the most accessible and efficient means.
Saba received a B.A. in Studio Art, Human Centered Design and Arabic Language from Dartmouth College (2020). Shooting internationally as a film photographer in the years following the pandemic, she is now completing her MFA in Design at Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University.
Sabamaheenstudio.cargo.site ; IG: @_snmart
Online Premiere
Content Notes: Sound of drones/ warplanes.
Logline: In Gaza in 2023, evacuation leaflets fall like starlings bearing critical news; a viewer’s shadow joins them, exposing the lethal irony of information in this iteration of the Palestinian genocide.
Synopsis: Starlings : Leaflets (2024) traces the violent paradox of information sharing during this iteration of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza, inflicted by Israeli Occupational Forces. Footage of evacuation leaflets – papers Gazans were forced to chase after despite their lethal unreliability – drifts across the screen like starling murmuration, echoing the birds’ collective movement to share signals of direction and survival. Layered atop one another, the two airborne forms blur into a single unsettling choreography, accompanied by binaural recordings from the streets of Gaza, the drone of warplanes, and the tremendous sound of wings flapping. Lines from Marwan Makhoul’s poem articulate the impossibility of hearing birds in a sky filled with machines of death. As an installation, a visitor’s body enters the projection, splitting and merging the images with their shadow, transforming witnessing into active participation. A companion website exists at www.leaflets.sabamaheen.com.
Artist Bio: Saba Maheen (b.1997 Lawrenceville, GA) is a female, queer, Muslim, Bengali-American, multimodal maker and thinker working with image, reproduction, and participation. Maheen considers portals that break down the dichotomy between print-digital, time-space, and human-computer. Her work tends toward repetition, multiples, editions, versions, iterations, units, modules, and collections, and is fabricated often through the most accessible and efficient means.
Saba received a B.A. in Studio Art, Human Centered Design and Arabic Language from Dartmouth College (2020). Shooting internationally as a film photographer in the years following the pandemic, she is now completing her MFA in Design at Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University.
Sabamaheenstudio.cargo.site ; IG: @_snmart
Online Premiere
