Revisiting the Psychological Impact of TV on Arab Artists at Abrons Arts Center
Mona Benyamin, Moonspace, 2020 (still), Courtesy of the artist.
The disorientation generated by television, a medium for mass communication, is the focus of a new exhibition at the Abrons Arts Center. Screen Memories, a group exhibition featuring video works by Yara Asmar (Lebanon), Mona Benyamin (Palestine), and Huda Takriti (Syria), opens on February 14, marking the United States debut for all three artists.
Curated by May Makki, Abrons Arts Center’s 2024-25 Curatorial AIRspace Resident, Screen Memories delves into “the psychological impact of mass media in the Arab world for a generation of artists who grew up at the tail end of network television's popularity.”
The exhibition includes Yara Asmar’s four-part video piece Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults (2024), which “transforms a children’s bedtime program into an interrogation of time and its passage.”
Mona Benyamin’s contributions include a three-part film series: Trouble in Paradise (2018), Moonscape (2020), and Tomorrow, again (2023). Through these works, Benyamin casts her parents in surreal recreations of television genres, “exploring what it means to narrativize generational trauma and historical catastrophe in Palestine.”
Also featured is a reimagining of Huda Takriti’s 2018 piece, Starry Nights. Presented as a two-channel installation, the work examines how news events are filtered through the memories of a television viewer.
Together, the works in Screen Memories are both eerie and nostalgic, encouraging viewers to reconsider their personal relationships with familiar television formats and reflect on their conscious and unconscious political implications.
Presented in partnership with Artists Alliance Inc., Screen Memories will be on view across two Lower East Side venues, Abrons Arts Center and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, from February 14 through April 14, 2025.
