Ahmad Ghossein

This video starts with a scene of a magician carrying an uncanny, tiny doll of human shape on his back. The video continues to follow the magician as he wanders around with this doll, performs magic and hypnosis, meets people, and sleeps. In between the scenes we see a deep valley and remote roadways in southern Lebanon. Sometimes the geometric form of a monument installed at the entrance of the village pops up. In the last scene, the magician steps down from the stage; after walking around awhile, he disappears, which seems his real last magic show. The 37 min-video does not deliver a clear meaning as much as it leads the audience toward a world of magic, illusion, or myth. Compared to the video’s rich imagery, the last subtitle text comes in a concise and poetic form: “In the geographical region that is the south, things are open to multiple readings. [...] time passes but events follow no sequence.” 

“Magic could produce a body on a body, a body from a body, except that it does not divide it, or gather its parts into one unified piece through which actions pass. This is, however, precisely the case with myth, whose power targets the bodies of the governed—which move as if frozen, the organisation of their limbs fixed, because they are forbidden from entering paths, and from leaving them, so they retreat inward, towards one of their organs distinguished by its expansiveness, and its elemental relationship with the external world (i.e., food or drink): the stomach.” (Roger Aouta, “On the Growth of the End, and Its Dangers”, Sharjah Biennial 12 Catalogue, 2015)