Emerson Contemporary

Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind
2025-02-04 12:00 - 2025-03-22 18:00 (America/New_York) | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
New multi-media exhibition explores memory, history, and grief through science fiction and cinematic time travel.

On view in Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery, February 4 – March 22, 2025.

BOSTON, MA (January 15, 2025) – Emerson Contemporary is proud to present Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales, featuring multi-channel films and a dramatic sculptural installation by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. On view in our Media Art Gallery are As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night , an Arabic-language opera on loss, mourning and inherited trauma accompanied by a dramatic sculptural installation and a two-channel science fiction film, In Vitro. A special one-night screening of the science fiction film In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and their latest documentary film Familiar Phantoms (2023) will augment the exhibition.

In much of their practice, Sansour and Lind use fiction as an imaginary mode to speak to the present in a manner that diffracts the highly charged political discourse on the historic and ongoing crisis in the Middle East. By ‘time traveling’ to both a faraway past and fictionalised futures, this exhibition explores how cinematic storytelling can open up new spaces for empathy and understanding of a shared human experience.

This exhibition is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Programming

Film Screening + Artist Conversation

Come view In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and Familiar Phantoms (2023). Filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind will be in conversation with Emerson Assistant Professor and Filmmaker Julia Halperin afterwards.

Film screening is co-presented with the RPM Film Festival and the Salem Film Fest.

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 7-9:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Location: Bright Family Screening Room, 559 Washington St. Boston, Ma, 02111

RSVP required for tickets: EVENTBRITE

Artist Reception + Conversation with Larissa Sansour, Søren Lind and exhibition curator Dr. Leonie Bradbury

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 5-7pm.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Ma 02111

About the artists: Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind are an artist duo who have collaborated on various films. They live and work in London. What underscores the significance of their work in the current context is the relationship between memory, trauma and the present to envision a more peaceful future. In 2019 they represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Larissa Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Soren Lind is a Danish author and director and visual artist with a background in philosophy. Lind wrote books on mind, language, and understanding before turning to art, film, and fiction. Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide.
