'The Land, not a film by Youssef Chahine' Finissage

The Land, not a film by Youssef Chahine (2025), is a documentary in the form of a sound-based interactive installation.

This interactive installation is similar to an audio walk, and it is required that you bring your phone and your headphones or earphones. It runs on a lightweight app that you will receive on your phone upon arrival. WiFi is provided.

It is the second instalment in the artist’s ongoing reckoning with their Arab identity and the injustices committed in the name of Pan-Arabism, most notably the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the resulting dispossession of the Nubian people from their ancestral lands.

Interrogating song and film as sites of memory, drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, this work extends the artist’s exploration of the performativity and myth-making inherent in nationalism. By staging nationalism as a cultural performance, the installation employs a critical irony that exposes its theatricality and manufactured grandeur, unsettling the very myths it seeks to examine.

While the first project, a short film titled There is a Baba in Our House (2021), examined cultural production and the family archive as components of public history, this installation turns to song and public speaking as sonic tools for manufacturing an Arab nationalist narrative around the Dam and the forced displacement of Nubians. By centring a Nubian perspective, and in collaboration with Nubian activists and researchers, the installation invites reflection on the power of cultural memory to either perpetuate historical erasure or resist it. Visitors are called upon to break the cycle of forgetting and engage critically with the narratives that shape collective memory.

This work was co-funded and first developed as part of the 2025 MA Thesis Exhibition in the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA).