Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices

Name: Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices
Start: 2025-04-19T00:00:00
End: 2025-08-09T23:59:00
Location: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

Past Exhibition

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

19 April - 9 August 2025

Entrance to the exhibition is free with museum admission. Museum tickets may be reserved online in advance of your visit.

The exhibition focuses on contemporary experiences of community life and exile, including the benefits and perils of transnational crossings.

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art presents Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices, an exhibition featuring works by more than 40 filmmakers and artists from the Arab world, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In 2024, it premiered to great acclaim at ACP-Palazzo Franchetti in Venice to coincide with the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Learn More Explore the Galleries

Comprising of seven galleries divided into ten immersive sections, each one is dedicated to themes such as deserts (i.e., cradles of civilisation and places of rebirth), ruins (i.e., relics of culture), borders (i.e., demarcations between allowed and forbidden places), and cosmos (i.e., exploration of the last frontier).

alt text — Film still from Sophia Al Maria, *Black Friday,* 2016, ed. 1/3, digital video, (16:36). Collection of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar

The films and video works span genres including fiction, documentary, animation, and memoir, often blending fantasy with fact, modernity with tradition, spirituality with postcolonial sensibilities.

Through the development of film and video collections, Mathaf, dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the Arab world, and the Art Mill Museum, Qatar's future museum of international modern and contemporary art, are proposing a new approach to the various forms of cinema, from feature film to video art, in order to fully include them in the writing of a global art history.

Exhibition Highlights

1 / 7

The Dam (2022) – Still by Ali Cherri

Ali Cherri, born in Lebanon in 1976, is an artist and filmmaker.

In Sudan, not far from the massive hydroelectric Merowe Dam, Maher, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to build a mysterious monument made of mud. As he constructs his mud tower, revolution is in the air around him, with talk of protests erupting against Omar AlBashir’s rule. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation slowly starts to take on a life of its own.

Still Image from Ali Cherri’s The Dam, 2022. Doha Film Institute Film Library

2 / 7

Banel & Adama (2023) – Still by Ramata-Toulaye Sy

Ramata-Toulaye Sy, born in France in 1986, is a French Senegalese filmmaker.

In Northern Senegal, Banel and Adama are a young couple that are in love. Beneath the sands are buried houses that Banel dreams of moving into with Adama, away from the stifling traditions of their small village. But extreme lack of rain threatens the residents and puts the interest of the community ahead of those of the couple. Adama will soon be forced to become the village’s new chief, putting an end to their dream.

Still Image from Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama, 2023. Doha Film Institute Film Library

3 / 7

Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s Gate) (2019) – Still by Randa Maroufi

Randa Maroufi, born in Morocco in 1987, is an artist and filmmaker.

Featuring a series of reconstructed situations based on observations made on the border of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil, the film focuses on the economic tensions that arise in that small territory that has become a gateway between Africa and Europe. Maroufi uses the pattern of a stage drawn onto the ground to set up these theatrical situations.

Still Image from Randa Maroufi’s Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s Gate), 2019. Doha Film Institute Film Library

4 / 7

It Must Be Heaven (2019) – Still by Elia Suleiman

Elia Suleiman, born in Nazareth in 1960, is a Palestinian filmmaker.

Leaving Nazareth for the bustling metropolises of Paris and New York, Suleiman turns his signature observational style from Palestine to a broader world, full of comparable tension, absurdity, and paranoia. In each new city, Suleiman is wide-eyed with curiosity and wonder, yet time and again, something always seems to remind him of the place he was born in. The film won the Jury Special Mention and FIPRESCI Critics’ Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.

Still Image from Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, 2019. Doha Film Institute Film Library

5 / 7

Beirut, 1001 Views (2010) – Still by Lamia Joreige

Lamia Joreige, born in Lebanon in 1972, is an artist and filmmaker.

This silent video animation represents a wide view of the Beirut harbour. This multilayered video is conceived as an amalgam of different vernacular photographs (from The Arab Image Foundation, The Fouad Debbas Collection, and An Nahar Documentation Center), taken at various times, each referring to a specific moment of history. Elements of the image disappear while other appear almost imperceptibly. However, the image remains suspended between past and present, appearance and disappearance, reflecting a time that is non-linear. In a single image, a ship from the 19th century floats in a photograph of sea from 1950, under a menacing skyline in the 80’s.

Still Image from Lamia Joreige’s Beirut, 1001 views, 2010. Collection of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar

6 / 7

Jewel (2010) – Still by Hassan Khan

Hassan Khan, born in the UK in 1975, is an Egyptian artist, musician, writer, and filmmaker.

Jewel opens with flashing lights gradually transforming into the form of an anglerfish accompanied by original music, created by the artist, informed and developed out of the shaabi genre; an urban music form with roots in the Egyptian popular classes. This mesmerising loop is the simple depiction of two men dancing. It is a restaging of a scene the artist encountered on a street in Cairo in 2006. That scene, only glimpsed, formed a vivid mental image.

Still Image from Hassan Khan’s Jewel, 2010. Collection of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar

7 / 7

In the Future They Ate from The Finest Porcelain (2015) – Still by Larissa Sansour

Larissa Sansour, born in East Jerusalem in 1973, is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker.

This short film resides at the intersection of sci-fi, archaeology, family history, and global politics. Combining live motion and CGI, Sansour explores the role of myth in the shaping of national identity: an imagined resistance group makes underground deposits of porcelain, suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to support future claims to their vanishing territories. Once unearthed, this buried tableware will prove the existence of these counterfeit people.

Still Image from Larissa Sansour’s In the Future They Ate from The Finest Porcelain, 2015. Doha Film Institute Film Library

This exhibition, curated by Matthieu Orléan, is produced by Qatar Museums, in collaboration with Media City Qatar, and co-organised by Doha Film Institute (DFI), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the future Art Mill Museum.

Note: A selection of films are being screened at the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) auditorium throughout the duration of the exhibition. Explore the film screening schedule here.

Featured Films and Video Works