An Evening with Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić

Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad share their artistic collaboration through a combined short screening program and artist talk. Over the past three years, Grozdanić and Saad have been jointly developing Permanent Trespass, a performance work dealing poetically with collective mourning and the fallout of imperialism and violent conflicts.

This script-based stage piece is now being expanded, in the spirit of a cinepoem, into a performance at EMPAC that incorporates new sound design, archival footage, and material from the in-progress film of the same name.

In their screening program and talk, the artists discuss their collaboration and current interests in connection to filmmaking: memory, mourning, the cultural fallout of conflicts in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia, and performance & dramaturgy.

The presentation will also feature a series of films that converge on thematic or formal grounds with Permanent Trespass in its various versions, selected jointly by the artists for this occasion.