Khaled Abdulwahed worked as a photographer in Syria before he became interested in the moving image. Exile, flight, and memory are themes that appear repeatedly in his filmic works. He produced his experimental short films Bullet (2011), Tuj (2012), and Slot in Memory (2013) while still in Damascus and Beirut. As a result of the war in Syria, he had to leave the country and travelled to Germany where since 2015 he has worked with the Berlin-based production company pong film. His first documentary film, Jellyfish (2016), deconstructs images of the ongoing civil war, while the short film Backyard (2018) is an experimental arrangement that explores the loss of images while revealing the memory of the landscape. Purple Sea (2020) is based on recordings from a sinking boat which were made during co-director Amel Alzakout’s own flight from Syria. The installation in the exhibition is based on Abdulwahed’s most recent film Background (2023), whose starting point is the experiences of his father who studied in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the end of the 1950s and documented his stay through a number of self-portraits in places such as Merseburg, Dresden, and Berlin. On the basis of the few remaining photos of his father, who later returned to Syria, Abdulwahed attempts to bring together the fragmented memories and cityscapes as they are today in photo-collages. In the process he fills lacunae that have been shaped by his own experience of flight.

Work in the exhibition: Background (2023) film, Arabic and German with English and German subtitles, 64′. Courtesy of the artist