Presentation

Filmed by Salem on a smartphone in the middle of the night, alone in a hotel room in Saudi Arabia, this self-portrait captures a moment of deep grief and disorientation; made in the aftermath of the death of the artist’s niece, whose life was shaped and ultimately cut short by online harassment and government surveillance. 

The original video documents a series of distorted facial expressions and slow, exaggerated movements of the tongue and face. The phone becoming a kind of mirror, a way of exploring the uncanniness of one’s own physical features reflected during a moment of psychic upheaval. The footage was later processed with AI tools using mainstream, commercially coded prompts, layering a strange synthetic sheen over the raw, unfiltered performance. 

The video was processed and edited in response to Shakeeb Abu Hamdan’s musical composition which in many ways parallels Salem’s working process. In Abu Hamdan’s sound work he often misuses commercial AI-driven noise-reduction software to craft incidental scraps of sound into hyperreal melodic progressions that resemble traditional instruments but have an unplaceable artificial quality to them.

The six-minute video is distilled from thirty minutes of emotional unraveling and grief. The sound and video carry the weight of mourning as well as a manic energy. The body becomes a site where autonomy and automation collide, shaped by both inner rupture and external systems of control. The work explores how the strangeness of corporeal reality made stranger as it collides with new tools capable of mediating that corporeality, surveilling it and transforming it into hallucinatory new images and sounds.

Biography

Anhar Salem is a multidisciplinary artist with a multi-ethnic background (Yemeni and Indonesian). Salem studied Information Technology at the Arab Open University in Jeddah, then completed a postgraduate degree at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing. Her artistic practice explores, documents, and reveals private spaces to the public realm through themes of everyday life, the body, and social media. Working primarily with video, Salem draws an emphasis on new forms of communication that critique video as a medium. She often improvises with her iPhone camera, working collaboratively with her subjects and characters as a means to foreground processes around the marginalization of people and their images.

Salem's work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize (2025), Révélation Art Numérique – Art Vidéo / ADAGP Prize (2021, France), the Prix Around Video Art Fair / Renato et Catherine Casciani (2021, France), the Radar Award at Curtocircuíto International Film Festival (2022, Spain), and the Prix Analix Forever / Galerie Analix (2021, France).

She has participated in several notable artist residencies, including the Pickle Bar Residency with Slavs and Tatars (Berlin, 2022), the Almansouria Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2023–2024), the Heretige and Innovation Residency (AlUla, 2024), and the Pinault Collection Artist Residency (Lens, 2025–2026).

Her solo exhibition “Mashallah. Why Did You Wander Out?” was presented at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2023).

She has also participated in prominent group exhibitions, including “THE FUTURE IS UNMANNED” at La HEAD (2024, Switzerland), “I Took a Screenshot of the Whole World” at POUSH (2023, France), and “PICKLE BAR PRESENTS” at West Den Haag (2023, Netherlands).

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan is a Lebanese/British artist, musician and recording engineer currently living in Paris. His performances centre around the use of drums, bells and cymbals which he augments and amplifies with surface transducers, microphones, pitch and rhythmic modulation effects, modified megaphones and other electronics.

His work has been recently been exhibited at Beirut Art Centre and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris and he was an artist in residence at EMS, Stockholm and at Les Instants Chavirés. His graphic novel “A Life Like Mine, That’s Impossible” was published by Samandal Comics (2021).

Credits

• A film by: Anhar Salem, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan

• Performance and editing: Anhar Salem

• Music: Shakeeb Abu Hamdan

• AI: Kaiber.ai

• Artistic Support: Thibaut Wychowanok

• Thanks to: Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Ludovic De Oliveira, Faye Formisano, Kaiyu Liu, Vadim Dumesh, Alice Brygo
  
  Special Thanks to Reiffers Art Initiatives for their support in producing this