Gabriella Choueifaty
WORKS
2006 (2018–2024)
35mm photographic series
“The recipient agrees to not take any photographs, videos or imagery from the sets, scenes, locations or anything related to the film, or publicly disclose confidential information or any imagery (including without limitation, on any social media) for any purpose or at any time unless (a) approved in advance by the Company, (b) required by law.”
These images were taken along the way, on the road from Riyadh to Dhurma, during the filming of an American/Arabic horror movie in Saudi Arabia in 2021. They capture fleeting glimpses of the desert through the bus window over several trips along the same route during a three-day shoot.
The shoot took place in the aftermath of Lebanon’s 2019 economic collapse and subsequent mass exodus. It also followed significant developments in Saudi Arabia, including the appointment of MbS, the creation of the General Authority for Entertainment (GAE), the launch of the Saudi Vision 2030 project in 2016, as well as the reopening of commercial cinemas and the establishment of the Ministry of Culture in 2018.
The work explores the legal and theoretical impossibility of representing or recreating this fleeting encounter with the film and the magnificent rocks of the Saudi desert – now a suspended memory. It attempts to fix a perception and let it linger, while expressing the act of looking away from the center towards what happens on the periphery – between moments when I was distracted, my attention no longer focused on the work or the set, but on its backdrop.
Aligned in series, like the continuous view from a bus window, each image captures two distinct spaces. First, a sharp background, achieved by focusing my camera to infinity, maximizing depth of field following a classical landscape photography technique. Second, a blurry and elusive foreground, created by the visual effect of movement on the printed image. The images are displayed together as a single frieze, traced at eye level on a wall, mimicking the way historical event timelines are presented in children’s curricula.