Screening and Discussion

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, November 10, at 7pm for "Here, Already", a screening of films by Salad Hilowle, Ahmed Umar, Samira Elagoz, and Z Walsh, guest-curated by Power Ekroth. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Ekroth, Umar, Elagoz, and Walsh.

Love takes different forms here, from desire hidden in plain sight to intimacy across continents, and music plays a rather different, but equally important, role in each of the three films. In Salad Hilowle’s Passion of Remembrance, 1990s Swedish pop and television reveal the contradiction of being celebrated for contributions to popular culture while still being treated as outsiders because of xenophobia. In Ahmed Umar’s film Truth Bears No Scandal (ِالـواضِح مو فـاضِح), queer desire, camouflaged within familiar Sudanese songs, is brought to the fore. In Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh’s You Can’t Get What You Want but You Can Get Me, music carries the excitement and longing of a love story unfolding across continents, with all the obstacles that distance brings. Moving from the public to the coded to the intimate, the works extend their antennae toward the society around them, reflecting on how the personal is political and how taking love and respect as guiding principles in life may be radical in its simplicity.

Films

Salad Hilowle, Passion of Remembrance (2020, 26 minutes)
In a collage of archival footage and newly filmed material, Salad Hilowle moves through representations of Black people in Swedish television and popular culture, particularly from the 1990s. Music videos, interviews and news reports feature artists such as Dr. Alban and Leila K, whose contributions to Swedish popular culture were celebrated while they were still treated as outsiders. Rapid editing contrasts with slower, more intimate sequences shot on 16mm and 35mm film, in which Black men and women occupy landscapes traditionally associated with Swedish identity. These scenes offer an alternative to the representations found in the archival material. The film takes its title from Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance.

Ahmed Umar, Truth Bears No Scandal (الـواضِح مو فـاضِح)‎(2024, 12 minutes)
In Truth Bears No Scandal (ِالـواضِح مو فـاضِح), Ahmed Umar revisits three well-known Sudanese songs with hidden queer love stories: songs written by men for their male lovers, and women for their female lovers. With little written documentation of Sudan's musical heritage, particularly its queer histories, Umar's research draws on oral testimonies collected from Sudanese sources in Cairo and online. From 19 songs believed to carry such stories, he selected three representing different musical genres. Rich in metaphor, religious references and expressions of love and longing, the songs have remained open to multiple interpretations, allowing their queer meanings to go largely unnoticed. Umar brings these stories to the fore, embracing them as an important part of Sudan's cultural heritage.

Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh, You can’t get what you want but you can get me (2024, 13 minutes)
A slideshow documenting two long-haired trans men falling madly in love. Over the course of one year, the artist couple Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh gathered photographs from real-life events such as their first kiss, meeting each other's parents, long-distance thirst traps, a beach wedding, and top surgery and its subsequent recovery. A sweet and steamy celebration of T4T love with life and art all tangled up.

Biographies

Salad Hilowle is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm. His research-based practice works across film, installation, sculpture, photography, and archival material, exploring questions of memory, representation, place, and Black presence within Swedish and Nordic histories. He holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and a BFA from Konstfack. His work has been presented at institutions including Nationalmuseum, Konstakademien, Hälsinglands museum, and the American Swedish Institute.

Ahmed Umar is an Oslo-based interdisciplinary artist and visual autobiographer. Working across media including sculpture, textiles, ceramics, video, photography, installation, and performance, his practice articulates narratives of queerness, migration, and spirituality. Rooted in lived experience, his work examines conditions of suppression and alienation alongside processes of liberation, resilience, and self-reclamation. He graduated with an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2016 and has since developed an extensive exhibition practice, including works in the 60th Biennale d’Arte di Venezia, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Toronto Biennale of Art.

Samira Elagoz is a Finnish–Egyptian transmasculine artist based between Berlin, New York and Helsinki. For over a decade, he has toured internationally across performance, film and visual art contexts, and received several prizes, including the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale Teatro (2022). Elagoz has dedicated his career to exploring topics such as gender dynamics, the politics of the gaze, intimate encounters, sexual violence, and its aftermath. He has built an extensive body of work documenting men, both cis and trans, through encounters arranged on platforms like Craigslist, Tinder, and Chatroulette, from one-off meetings to longer love stories.

Z Walsh is a Brooklyn-based artist creating raw, intimate portraits of his subjects and himself. Working as a male photographer, Z's practice is shaped by his past experience modeling and doing sex work as a girl. Since coming out in 2016, Walsh has been recognized internationally as a photographer and director. His work is guided by an unwavering commitment to studying and adoring transgender beauty while combating transmasculine erasure.

Power Ekroth is a curator and editor of SITE Zones currently on residency at ISCP funded by OCA – Office for Contemporary Art, Norway.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Avenue (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.