Capture is a film combining 35mm photographs from the collections, depots and stores of the Musée d'Histoire de Marseille and archaeological sites in Martigues. Formed as a lecture, the film is a continuation of Alrai's practice and research on postcolonial museography, systems of hierachy and value.

An experimental short film that expresses a subjective experience during quarantine and was made as an attempt to locate ourselves living in ongoing semi-isolated life. It is a variety of dreamy images, that help reflect our thoughts and slow-past lifestyle. Images that link our isolated reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media. Worlds that are filled with humans, especially women spend their entire lives in compulsory quarantine because of unfair social systems.  

A film edited from found-footage of the October Revolution in Iraq. On October 1, 2019 mass protests erupted in Baghdad, as they often had since the 2003 invasion and occupation began. This time, the protests spread as young people, and Iraqis…

See Without Being Seen contextualizes Orientalist photography in the Middle East and North Africa along the historical timeline. It reflects on the language of photography, in its violent connotations, which bares its history in the colonial framework.

Whilst the iron jaws of dictatorship eat up the marshlands, the plight of the people is brought to the fore as the soul-stirring film draws to a close.

Visions of Basra explores some of my mother’s fragmented memories…

Cineholic is a film about a group of cinephiles who want to screen films. Watching a film for them is fighting. The people of this film are based in Kirkuk, where there is neither a public sphere for discussion nor cinema halls to show films.

When I immigrated to Finland, I started facing a deep shock regarding the differences between the two cultures. Finding myself on the border between the two helped my practice but distracting for my selfdom, affecting my decisions and creating a fertile ground for confusion and turmoil. When the world slowed down during the pandemic, I decided to turn my lens and start investigating my identity and perspective. I exposed myself to all the possible ways to understand what had indeed gone wrong in the process of figuring out a third self that came to be me. Music was the best…

The lack of archival resources in Iraq had opened windows for different interpretations. Places and happenings had turned anecdotal. Context had turned them into traditions with new content. Facts have abandoned their authenticity and their existence in time by turning into myths. Since the founding of the modern state of Iraq, the country never had an official national anthem to represent it. Yet, subsequently numerous anthems arouse with direct connections to who ruled the state. According to rumours, the country’s earliest national anthem was sung for the first time in Germany in the1930s by an Iraqi delegation during an international…

The Ballad of Special Ops Cody takes as its starting point a 2005 incident in…

Echolocation is a film of voices distant and nearby: the rain in Oakland, my grandmother's home in Baghdad, my aunts' voices in What's App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio. As fragments resonate and accumulate, spaces of loss are subsumed into new landscapes and forms.

As a member of the immigrant generation that illegally journeyed from Iraqi Kurdistan to Europe on foot, Hiwa K’s ‘Mirror’ simulates an experience of walking through foreign territory. Using an “object-sculpture” made of stick and motorbike mirrors which he balances on his nose, Hiwa K finds his way. The object acts as a navigation device and what Hiwa K calls “an adaptation tool” that he uses to familiarize himself with unknown spaces. It is an extension of the organs and senses, providing the traveler (and viewer) with various mirrored perceptions, “seemingly longing to my body rather than belon-…