Jouer la montre

Solo exhibition by Mona Benyamin as part of Saison Méditerranée, proposed by Triangle-Astérides and B7L9. For her first solo exhibition, Mona Benyamin presents in Marseille the opening section of an unprecedented film diptych, along with three earlier video works. Born in 1997, she is a visual artist, filmmaker and cellist born in Haifa. She lives and works between Haifa and the Hudson Valley in New York State. Like an invitation to set things in motion, a strangely familiar rhythm spreads through the exhibition space. Supported by the drone of a cello and the crack of a snare drum, it gradually turns into a repetitive loop. One after another, then in chorus, the voices of twelve performers whose faces are never revealed overlap. Their spectral presence echoes that of two recurring figures in Mona Benyamin’s films: her parents. Michel and Nahia Benyamin variously appear as sitcom stars, music-video performers, television news presenters or horror-film characters. Drawing on television conventions, which she subverts, Mona Benyamin plays with comic and tragic registers to tell stories of dispossession and the intergenerational transmission of memories and traumas linked to the collective Palestinian experience. For the artist and her protagonists alike, laughter acts as a potential strategy for adaptation and psychological survival in the face of the traumas of the Nakba.