Al-Sweel works around the image as a primal communicational technology that started with cave paintings and which we now return to on image-based platforms. The film links this early intelligence to the development of Islamic cosmology, looking at the emergence of online divination practices amongst ‘witches and sages’ of the Arabian Peninsula. Drawing on influences from Abbasid astronomer Thābit Ibn Qurra in "On Talismans" and French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment and the hand, the film brings together a cast of media personalities to shed light on voices from the subaltern: the internet, following a fictional palm reading session taking place in Dubai’s rococo vintage hotels of the Deira district [old town]. Hotels in the region are associated with the privilege of anonymity. Patrons often take solace in occupying this neutral space to perform illicit or secretive conduct: from romantic rendezvous to transactions often too esoteric to be recognized within the structures of commerce today. Characters in the film include TikTok fortune-tellers, female islamic scholars and current US presidential candidate Marianne Williamson -- Williamson's interest in wellness has landed her in unpredictable cyber spaces, where she gained popularity amongst a new generation of e-girls and podcast dwellers. By using US foreign policy as a metaphor for image as narrative, the artist looks at images in time of war and how they’ve become an incoherent globalist lingua franca that influences markets and politics–symbolic and material procedures of power in their own right.
Credits
Cast
