Talk: EVERYTHING THAT IS, an exploration of cultural heritage, art and survival
Join us for the second talk in the Echologies programme with Shourideh Molavi, centred on the themes in her exhibition EVERYTHING THAT IS, which takes its name from the film directed by Shourideh Molavi and executive produced by renowned filmmaker Laura Poitras. The film follows Mehdi Karira, the last remaining puppet maker in Gaza, as he transforms remnants of war — cans, wood, rubble from bombed homes into puppets and dolls. Once based in a northern Gaza studio, Mehdi now lives with his family and his creations in a tent on the street.
Through archival and drone footage captured during the ongoing Israeli military campaign, the film documents Mehdi’s creative process, narrating the intersections of art, displacement, and survival. Interwoven with previously unpublished poems by Gazan poet Jawad Al-Aqqad, read by Palestinian figures Noura Erakat and Hazem Jamjoum, the film highlights the urgent work of a generation of Gaza-based artists striving to depict communities beyond the colonial and humanitarian lens of suffering.
Through her two installations at DaDa, including the photo essay Teaching Life, which honours the legacy of Al-Azhar university, the exhibition explores the destruction of cultural heritage, revealing the links between culture and power while foregrounding the role of refusal and resistance in art and storytelling.
Molavi’s talk in dialogue with local film maker, archivist and curator at Dar Bellarj, Rim Mejdi asks us to consider art, heritage and survival when thinking alongside Palestine.
_
Shourideh C. Molavi is the lead Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture, linking FA’s investigations to the work and research of civil society, grassroots groups and human rights defenders in the country. She is a scholar in political science and human rights and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. Shourideh has two decades of extensive academic, legal research, and fieldwork experience in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine/Israel, on the topics of human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power. She is Senior Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in NYC. Her publications include Stateless Citizenship: The Arab Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013); Contemporary Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2018); Environmental Warfare in Gaza (Pluto Press, 2024); Constituting the Jewish State: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Exclusion (I.B. Tauris, 2025).