Satellite Telefizyoon takes all of its visual content from a popular 1987 Egyptian television quiz show titled Hawl El Alam (Around the World). In the show the iconic singer/ actress Sherihan would appropriate the costume, song, and dialect of an unnamed country and conclude by asking her audience to guess which country she was representing.

Focusing on the positioning of Egyptian women in relationship to their European, South American, Asian, and African sisters, Sherihan is made to quotes academics Laura Bier, Timothy Mitchell, and Anthony Shay through falsified subtitles to provide a brief history of Egyptian conceptions of modernity from the 1950-80’s. Parallel to the contrast between academic texts and 1980’s kitsch imagery, the juxtaposition of early products of cultural globalization with post-colonial and non-aligned rhetoric creates a visual dialogue addressing Egyptian Independence, neo-colonialism, and post-modernity.

Satellite Telefizyoon (the phonetic translation of Satellite ‘Television’ in Arabic) highlights the willingness of Egyptian media to engage, reproduce, and distribute stereotypical depictions of other cultures in order to highlight the state’s modernizing project in the 1980’s. 

Screened at:

False Histories - Nothing to See Here
Denver, USA
2016 

7th Cairo Video Festival
Medrar
Cairo, Egypt
2015

Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival
Kassel, Germany
2014

International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Oberhausen, Germany
2014

Incident Light: Gendered Artifacts and Traces Illuminated in the Archives
Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto Mississauga
Mississauga, Canada
2014

Toronto New Works
PleasureDome
Toronto, Canada
2013