a night of barely an hour and a half

a night of barely an hour and a half brings together two artists whose works explore the night as a site of illusion, omen, and celestial narrative. Their pieces weave a narrative where the personal meets the historical, and where gazing at the sky becomes a prism for political and existential reflection. In this fleeting night the artists invite us to consider what glows, fades, or resists in the space between shadow and light.

Drawing from Levantine ornamentation and the constructed illusions of a planetarium, Vaster than Empires moves between theatricality and celestial memory. In Une naine rouge, a dying star becomes a spectral beacon over a cemetery of astral bodies. Through the figure of Ashtar, the work evokes mourning, resilience, and the enduring pulse of revolt.

Sur ma peau argentée is anchored in a solar eclipse that coincides with the artist’s birth hour. This event becomes a pretext for exploring the anxiety of shining, the mythological tales of dragons and snakes swallowing the sun, but also the ideological distortions that have darkened this celestial body, unfolding a meditation on the rise of fascism and the repression of marginalized bodies.

Juli Sando is an artist and filmmaker. She experiments with filmmaking as much as with performance, multimedia installation, text and sound. Her work combines poetry and politics, questioning language, identity and society. Characterised by a focus on moments of transition and disappearance, her work seeks to identify the possibilities of resistance within the diversity of identities. Her latest film ‘Fuku Nashi’, which has won four awards, takes an intimate look at the issue of mixed race. Her installations contain video, sound and tangible objects, which coexist, sometimes in an immersive way.

Alex Ghandour plays with spectacle and the spectacular, tracking down gestures, rituals and transmissions as experimental fields where everything can be turned upside down. Their work delves into the circuits of images, bodies and narratives, looking for the cracks where identity and collective memory are twisted, replayed and reinvented. Alex creates immersive experiences that flirt with staging as a space for disturbance and transformation. A graduate of the Art Gender Nature Institute at the HGK in Basel (master’s degree) and of edhea, Ghandour navigates between exhibitions, performances and other situations where art refuses to be tamed.

The exhibition is accompanied by texts by Nayansaku Mufwankolo and Jessika Jamal Khazrik.