Conver­sation:
Jumana Manna
and Sille Storihle

SALT Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema

Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle will talk about their research for, and the resulting collaborative work, The Goodness Regime (2013) which is included in the exhibition A Century of Centuries. Taking their artwork as a starting point, Manna and Storihle will describe the process of development, from the initial motivation to the gathering of material and the production of the actual film. Centering around their unique collaboration between two contexts, the talk will offer an insight into the political nuances involved in the work and its relevance within the exhibition.

With the help of a cast of children, The Goodness Regime investigates the foundations of the ideology and self-image of modern Norway – from the Crusades, via the adventures of Fridtjof Nansen and the trauma of wartime occupation, to the diplomatic theater of the Oslo Peace Accords.

Shot in Norway and Palestine, the film combines the children’s performances with archive sound recordings (including US President Bill Clinton speaking at the signing of the Oslo Accords, and Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik’s New Year address to the Norwegian people in 2000) and new documentary footage filmed on location.

In the course of their research, Manna and Storihle interviewed Ron Pundak, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo back-channel talks, and Hanan Ashrawi, the former Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) spokeswoman; the film premiered at Kunsthall Oslo exactly twenty years after the conclusion and signing of the Oslo Agreement by Israel and the PLO in August and September 1993.

This program is the fourth of five conversations organized in parallel with the exhibition A Century of Centuries. Each conversation invites two artists, or an artist and a curator, to discuss their work in more depth in order to create a more complex dialogue between the artists and the content of the works in the exhibition.

The talk will be held in English.