Events calendar
Autumn Research Seminar: Professor Rosalind Galt
For our final research seminar of the 2026 Autumn term, we welcome Professor Rosalind Galt (KCL) for a talk entitled 'Time travel and historical imaginaries of Palestine in the films of Heiny Srour and Larissa Sansou'. This will be followed by a Q&A and drinks reception in the academic studio. All welcome.
Abstract:
This talk examines time travel as an anticolonial aesthetic response to the challenge of representing historical experiences of dispossession and ongoing genocidal violence. Time travel speaks of temporal disjunctures in which pasts, presents, and/or futures are placed into disruptive contiguity. In Heiny Srour鈥檚 Leila and the Wolves (1984), a history of women鈥檚 contribution to the struggle in Palestine and Lebanon is unfolded through the protagonist鈥檚 own appearance in crucial moments of history from the 1920s to the 1980s. Srour鈥檚 palimpsest of memory, historiography, and fabulation echoes in Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind鈥檚 experimental videos, such as Nation Estate (2012) and In Vitro (2019), in which Palestine is projected as both a speculative future and a series of memories. In juxtaposing the temporal disjunctures of Leila and the Wolves with Sansour and Lind鈥檚 videos, I will trace a cinematic approach to Palestinian history that persists in a retrospective project of witnessing while proposing speculative alternatives to the insufficiencies of archival documentary.
