Ebadur Rahman’s Creative Portfolio Materials/ Link to Online Portfolio

1. The Citizens of the Wombs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of0kH8d-ExI

https://vimeo.com/110723874

Password: nakhojabad

Artist Statement

Neither a social form, nor a knot of ontic concerns with the medium of film, The Citizens of the
Wombs adduce an euro-eccentric cinematic space of potential, outside historical-time and
historicity, superstructured as a performative architecture of experiential, lived in and living
cultural organisms, still throbbing with traces of violence and retro-futuristic memory of
insurrection-time.

Let me reiterate: The Citizens of the Wombs stand in for an absent panorama of an a-historical
vision, which was not discoursed but, articulated, presided and poem-ed as a makeshift
architecture.

No need to invoke a slanted reading of Deleuze to unhinge the relation between time and image
or the complex articulation of becoming and the outside; The Citizens of the Wombs, composed
of four films/videos, traverse by the double inverse movement of two heterogenous directions
one of which is lunched towards the future (art) that never arrives and, one inaugurates a
past(art) that never was. The performing architecture of The Citizens of the Wombs affords the
spectators an impossible theorem: they cannot perceive it without having come to the end of the
understanding of the art-culture-history-rights-ethnography-anthropocentric body of knowledge
upbraided and, mishmash with; but, the end of understanding would not come until the end of the
film, hence inside The Citizens of the Wombs becoming is outside, inside is inverse, end is the
beginning, beginning is the end, definitions are doldrums, demarcations are in tantrum and,
deaths are in installments. The Citizens of the Wombs could only be viewed in the present by
reviewing it already in the past when the past is being constantly thwarted and put into an anti-
reality by the violent present. What Maurice Blanchot called, the vertigo of spacing impacts the
comprehension and, the visibility of the Films/Videos because the limit and the legitimacy of the
image submits to the memory of itself where it has to be blackouted.

Synopsis: The womb is a war-on-terror issue drama. Le Ebad, an internationally renowned

filmmaker from Bangladesh, made a controversial film, The Citizens of the Wombs, which is
destroyed and, it is said, either Ebad has been arrested/abducted or he has left the county to avoid
an arrest. Before Ebad (was) arrested/disappeared, Thomas, on a commission from European
Public TV, had tracked him down to make a documentary on the making of The Citizens of the
Wombs, and also interviewing Le Ebad's motley crew of hackers and, whistleblower vigilantes,
who are publishing/leaking hitherto unseen sex tapes of important officials or brutal videos of
people being killed by ruling party goons or by a special para-military force. The seamless mix
of fiction and non-fiction, the hyper-real look, and the mostly un-staged documentary content, in
The Citizens of the Wombs, make for a grueling viewing experience in the realm of the taboo
and déclassé.

2. Lost in Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hApvniHtZk&t=10s

https://vimeo.com/308607255

Password: lost

Artist Statement

Why two Syrian musicians are risking everything to play Mozart from city to city when Europe
is squirming in pain? Universal themes of music and faith of Alaa and Tareq's story are situated
in the context of the conjoined telos of Dutch Artist Louwrien Wijer and German Artist Joseph
Beuys' who organized to bring Dalai Lama in Bonn to commence a program entitled "Art Meets
Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy" that would ultimately gather six Nobel prize
winners and art world luminaries like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marina Abramović etc.
The connecting thread between these stories is a cancer-ridden Tunisian dancer who
accompanied French artist Yves Kleine to the Papal Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi and,
performed in Guggenheim museum for philosopher Jacques Derrida and, now losing her
memory while her son retraces a strange and sublime history of now. Lost in Love weave
together three narrative strands : 1. A Bangladeshi filmmaker takes care of his ill Mother--a
dancer loosing her memory due to the harsh cancer treatment-- and travels through Bangladesh,
India, Italy, France, Greece and Holland, in the process of tracing parts of his turbulent
childhood. Mother is Tunisian; born in Nice; an avowed masochist and, had moved in the circle
of the first generation of performance artists etc. Mother had worked closely with Wilhelm
Reich, Joseph Beuys, and the French and US Fluxus artists while abandoning the filmmaker--as
a toddler-- in a commune, with strangers, from where he was rescued by his father. 2. Through
Mother’s and filmmaker's past experience, in the 70s, we enter the narrative of Louwrien Wijer,
a Dutch artist, working towards realizing what Joseph Beuys called Eurasia, and compassionate
currency; she brought together Joseph Beuys and Dalai Lama to establish a University in Tibet, a
project which inaugurated a five day conference, Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a
Changing Economy, where art world luminaries like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marina
Abramović and six Nobel laureate economist and scientists among others, actively took part. 3.
While traveling in Italy, in 2015, the filmmaker befriended two Syrian Refugees: Alaa, a
classically trained violinist, and Tareq, a polyglot poet and, professional interpreter. The film’s
real narrative backbone is the filmmaker’s relationship with Alaa and Tareq that spans over 2
years: 2015-2017. In 2017, Alaa and his friend, an Italian, takes a trip from Treviso, Italy to
Thessaloniki, Greece, playing music from town to town, with local musicians; while Tareq waits
for them in Thessaloniki, he learns that, his Russian ex-girlfriend is pregnant with her child. Lost
in Love explores--through characters and narratives--an hitherto fore unseen world of a mixed
artist communities which has it's roots in what Joseph Beuys called pre--Christian impulses that
find its latest reincarnation in an emergence of new humanity in the inter-being of locals and
recently arrived foreigners, and in the birth to beautiful hybrids of emotional and, spiritual
states,and quotidian rituals. The film will invite domestic and international audiences inside a
world-making that might otherwise stay closed but if opened, could provide crucial lessons of
tolerance, sharing of love, joy, vulnerability and, helplessness, in a mutually intertwining saga of
overcoming fear and, an antidote to toxic masculinity and, identity politics to usher new
beginnings.

3. V for Venus/Venezia
This is a 31min.video essay, researched, written, and directed by Ebadur Rahman.
(V for Venus/Venezia is made possible with the kind cooperation of The Dissident
Goddesses' Network/The Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
Special Thanks to Governor of Lower Austria, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, and the
German ambassador to Austria H.E. Dr. Johannes Haindl; curator Christian Bauer;
Zuecca Projects and, PhotoPhore.)

https://vimeo.com/356296406
Password: Venus

Artist Statement

V for Venus/Venezia is primarily based on Elisabeth von Samsonow's performance The

Psychopolitical Souvenir Shop, with Ida-Marie Corell, at the Spazio Ridotto, at the opening
of Elisabeth Von Samsanow and Juergen Teller’s Exhibition, in the 58th International Art
Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2019.
V for Venus/Venezia also distills more than four hours of interview materials with Elisabeth Von
Samsanow, Ida-Marie Corell and, other participants and observers; Elisabeth Von Samsanow’s
press conference at the Venice Biennale 2019; research on Paleolithic art, Venus figurines;“pre-
historic” and living goddesses animated through curated,found and scrap footages consistent
with V for Venus/Venezia aura, aesthetic and arguments.

While V for Venus/Venezia references the predecessor of The Psychopolitical Souvenir Shop—
Elisabeth von Samsonow’s, Munich performance: The Parents' Bedroom Show, the photographic
documentation of which constitutes the core of Elisabeth Von Samsanow and Juergen
Teller’s Exhibition in Venice—the theorization and argumentation of the essay occur at a very
specific level: First, the essay configures Elisabeth’s goddesses—Devi, Venus etc.—as an
organizing principle and attempt to examine how goddesses trigger a thousand arrested
dialectics—in images and mnemonic and cronotropic architectures—while acknowledging that,
this screen based work—like any filmic creation—temporizes space and Devi is not from or in
any space and Devi creates and eats time. The contours of The Parents' Bedroom Show’s primal
scene and Elisabeth’s demand of a knowledge that she knows is there—but is withheld from
her—undergirds V for Venus/Venezia.
Also, The Psychopolitical Souvenir Shop which can only be recalled and exist, now, on various
screens—TV, tablet, laptop, telephone to name a few—unfolds, I’ve argued in V for
Venus/Venezia, on the level of the events of history and, the level of an accumulation of cultural
knowledge, but more importantly the level of the popular and, unspoken spirit of the times which
bridges many seemingly unrequitable binaries: goddess and people; art and craft; occident and
orient etc. Elisabeth von Samsonow’s in her The Psychopolitical Souvenir Shopanticipates
discursive jouissance and, desires knowledge;— but let us not forget such or any desire implies a
loss: one only desires what one does not have. But Elisabeth von Samsonow’s performance is
cleverly orchestrated to invoke jouissance, to not to localize loss in a way that allows it to be
utilized, by choreographing the living goddesses’ economy of contamination: supernatural
contaminating the natural, the transcendental the immanent. Hence, V for
Venus/Venezia attempts to manifest how Elisabeth breaks down the illusion of smooth
performative panorama of time; personal vis-à-vis political; historical transition and, continuity
by erasing thresholds and, disrupts complex taxonomies of societal place making.

V for Venus/Venezia, in its argumentation too, follows the logic of the performance to disturb
the smooth exterior of this explicit reality to confront the invisibility of the “impossible”
objects—masculine/feminine knickknacks,(de)archived goddesses-statuetes etc.—head on;
the film uses Elisabeth/goddesses’ interactions with the public to animate—with
meaning,coherence and relevance—each artifact and it's contemporary significance.

4. Atrocity Exhibition

‘Pushing the envelope furthest is Atrocity Exhibition, showing in the Short Film corner,
which its director Ebadur Rahman has described as “Cannes’ first snuff film.” Says
Rahman: “Cannes has been showing fake ‘extreme content’ for ages: Any film by
Tarantino, Takeshi Miike, or Kim Ki Duk is at least as violent as mine. What’s different
about Atrocity Exhibition is, I didn’t fake it.” Asked whether viewers might have to look
away during screenings, Rahman says: “I would hope so.”’
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-ultra-violence-peppers-competition-
524062

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYlHQ7L6vu8

https://vimeo.com/68296299

Password: nakhojabad
Artist Statement

Atrocity Exhibition is a post 9/11 war-on-terror snuff film.

State endorsed vigilante execution and, extra judiciary killing--specially drawing on the post
9/11 war-on-terror global panic conditions--have an unparalleled ability to pinpoint social
nerves. "Atrocity Exhibition" opens with the mob killings of few Rohingya refugees, from
Myanmar, for their alleged connection with the Islamist elements in Bangladesh.
Unblinkingly the phallic gaze of the camera sneaks up on another execution of a minority man,
in front of the police and the media, where government goons are hacking him to death.
Working with un-staged, real life footage, sans verbal commentary or description, "Atrocity
Exhibition" unravels a culture of impunity--in a failed state-- that overwhelm the fundamental
human, legal and political principles in place since the 17th century.

5. Pornographia

https://vimeo.com/73385145
Password:utopia99

Artist Statement

Pornographia is a rape-culture interrogation machine.

The hyper-real look and the mostly un-staged documentary content, in Pornographia, makes for
a grueling viewing experience in the realm of the taboo and déclassé. In essence the movie puts a
Duchampian frame around the Girls Gone Wild genre of documentary porn, if not its hard-core
online analogues.
Pornographia is, also, a film about its own making vis-a-vis the pornographic/the chauvinist/the
racist mind and, the conditions which sustains it: Pornographia examines certain behaviors and
events in our culture such as sexual slavery, rape, genocide and, explores images from the
pornographer's mind where we all participate-- as consumers and, cultural producers, with, as
Hannah Arendt tells us, nothing behind us but the past—into an odorless, constantly sharable
Digital time, which is, in turns, comprises of infinite identical units, all infinitely replicable and,
equally weightless.
This film attempts to interrogate how and, in what way we want to know things and, experience
image today; when and through what processes images of violation--think, Guantanamo or
images of American army using rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing--or murder become mass
entertainment.
Are there residues of violence that accumulate from digital-time passing into atomizing oblivion?
Is there any ethical complexity throbbing in the outskirts of the Frame, in an époque, where
rapists rush to post torture porn on Facebook/YouTube?
Is rape culture in here to stay?
Is what philosopher Paul Virilio calls “purewar” is the new peace?
 6. The Tomb of Qara Köz: Installation

My Curatorial and Artist Statement

The Tomb of Qara Köz is a site-specific (transmedia) public art installation, replicating
Indian/Afghani roadside tombs of Mughal princess Qara Köz, the deity of exiles who exerted
powerful influence in the Florence of the Medicis, as well.
The Tomb of Qara Köz is organized in three planes:
1st Plane
interweaving of the multifarious narrative of Qara Köz circulating already in the collective
imaginary and, iterated recently, once again, by Salman Rushdie in the The Encantess of
Florence; by the films Mughal-e-Azam(1960) and, Jodha Akbar (2008); and connect and, locate
these between realities in the form of a performative architecture to activate an open network--
emotion and memory--of Bengali (illegal) immigrants who're impacting the psychogeographical
tapestry of Venice and, collect their resistance narratives in a publication.
2nd plane
a pyramid-tomb will be made of 1254 plastic cups used by international volunteers at work in the
refugee camps of Lampedusa and Lesvos; the main body of the pyramid consisting of 1254 cups
invokes the birth year of Marco Polo and, the shifting associations of Calvino's tales of fluid
invisible cities (each a different fluid Venice) invoked by Marco Polo in the court of the Chinese
emperor Kubla Khan; each cup will be decorated with an egg inscribed/imaged/arted by a newly
arrived refugee with the cartoonish fragments of the works of venician painters like Jacopo
Bassano,Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Farinati to raconteur the tale of Robert Coover's
Pinocchio's adventures in Venice, Thomas Mann's Aschenbach in search of purity in the Death
of Venice, or Mahler's reading of Li Tai-Po ...
Of course, I'm, also, enacting Virgil's legend of magical eggs to fortify foundations.

3rd Plane
The Tomb's 3rd plane pays homage to Ai Weiwei's Documenta 12's project, Fairytale, by
bringing 1254 Bengali "illegal" immigrants or refugees to the Tomb, so that they can pay alms
and, pray to Qara Köz to make their wishes to come true. Eventually, an HTML5 website will
transmit the recordings of these prayers, interactively.

The Tomb of Qara Köz, in an uninhibited polyphenomenality of display, evidences lived live(s)-
-in transformation, in polyphony; its synthetic/syncretic approach, rooted in Opera Aperta-like
traditional Bengali theater, attempts to stage a conceptual muse en abyme.
(c)EbadurRahman
https://www.instagram.com/qarakoz95062/

7. Theater Piece: Diamond Babu's Bengali Bioscope

Synopsis
Diamond Babu’s Bengali Bioscope’s story takes place at the beginning of the 20th century in
India. Set in Calcutta, the second most important city of the British Empire, it is not about
strange customs in the backwater of the Raj. The play explores the central tensions
of renaissance thought: rationalism, tradition and religiosity; individualism versus community
spirit and the inherent moral dilemmas. Diamond Babu’s Bengali Bioscope highlights the
drawbacks of modern progress in the former colonies, and the politics of erasure in practice, that
maintain the dominance of the western narrative.
Hiralal or Diamond Babu is a sophisticated, modern intellectual. He is well educated in both
western philosophy and eastern ethics. He has technological acumen but, at the same time, a
lack of business sense. His generosity, coupled with a reckless streak, reflects the struggle of
Bengali culture to retain its native soul against a British and western hegemony.
Cast and Production Team

§ Cast: Rez Kabir and Jordon Kemp

§ Play by Ebadur Rahman
§ Directed by Mukul Ahmed
§ Design by Erica Greenshields

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cr6owSFU_M

https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/News_events/Events/2020/November_2020/Diamond-
Babu%27s-Bengali-Bioscope.aspx

Full-length Feature Film

8. Screenplay: Alpha
Ebadur Rahman cowrote, Alpha, a Bengali language film, which represented Bangladesh at the
92nd Academy Awards/ 2020 Oscars for the international feature film category.

Links:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/2020-oscars-bangladesh-selects-alpha-international-
feature-film-category-1240700

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4215675/

https://mubi.com/films/alpha-2019/cast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMliSn2PPKE

9. Guerilla

Ebadur Rahman cowrote, Guerilla, a Bengali language film, which wins The Network for the
Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) for the best Asian film; 10 National Awards. Ebadur
wins Bangladesh’s highest awards, for film, in two categories.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_for_the_Promotion_of_Asian_Cinema
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4215675/

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=guerrilla+bangla+full+movie

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1906386/awards

https://www.thedailystar.net/news/guerrilla-bags-10-national-film-awards

https://www.worddisk.com/wiki/Bangladesh_National_Film_Award_for_Best_Screenplay/

10. Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!)

// Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh'n 'nen Film!)
Ebadur Rahman 2015, 17'33''

Links:

https://k3filmfestival.com/2007-2018/de/spechteln.html
https://issuu.com/k3festival/docs/spechteln_booklet_all

https://vimeo.com/149519669
(This is a vertical film; I'm sorry for the inconvenience re watching it, in this format.)

Artist Statement
Commissioned by K3 Festival(http://www.k3festival.com/en/spechteln) in Villach,
Austria, Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) is conceived as a trans-
media film—with related properties such as animmersive interactive website, a full conversion
modder game, and experiential pedagogical packages—to integrate the richness of machinima
and, the logic of New York Times/Al Jazeera poornographies, to borrow art critic Tirdad
Zolghadr’s parlance.
While the portmanteau moniker Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) are
culled from Schlingensiefs’ two separate cinematic works, namely “Ausländer raus” and
“Mensch Mami, wir dreh'n 'nen Film!” one could clearly locate the utopian traces of not only
media and video arts but typical European, and European inflected, high art works of Isidore
Isou, Yves Klein, Robert Filliou, Joseph Beuys, Eikoh Hosoe, Yayoi Kusama, Tatsumi Hijikata,
Chitralekha, Vivan Shundaram etc. in Foreigner's out’s staging of oppositional communication
contra the statist power by questioning the paradigm of disciplinary societies and the techné of
control of the individual body, and the bodies of information.
At the center of Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!), one of the key
sequences of Atrocity Exhibition—a post 9/11 war-on-terror snuff film I previously made—has
been installed, not only to specially draw attention to the post 9/11 war-on-terror global panic
conditions of a low intensity warfare on
the underdeveloped, but Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) also
attempts to connect the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal” scripts—of disaster
visibility—vis-à-vis Rohingyas from Myanmar in Bangladesh, with Afghani, Syrian, Iranian and
Tamil refugees arriving in Germany, through Villach, Austria, and the vicinity. Using the
sequence from Atrocity Exhibition—exhibiting, unblinkingly, the mob killings of few Rohingya
refugees, in front of the police, and the media—and utilizing multiple theoretical juxtapositions,
poor images, and exploration of the violence of war-on-terror policy in the south Asia, perhaps,
pushes Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) to link the changed politics
of the post 9/11world and, refugee crisis with the art historical crisis of definition and,
categorization.
Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) combines two streams of visual
ideas: a satire of Schlingensiefs’ satire of Hollywood disaster movies on one hand; on the other
hand, an adoption of the perplexity, and the implication of Jonas Mekas’ position in Lost Lost
Lost— Oh let my camera record the desperation of the small countries. Oh, how I hate you, the
big nations, you always think that you are the only ones, and others should only be part of you
and speak your language. Oh come, come the dictatorship of the small countries. —which
doesn’t remain confined to a artistic discourse, or even to a big-nation vs. small-nation, center vs.
margin, north vs. south matrix, but manifest a discursive wound cum blind spot which lends
itself to a metaphysical schema to engender an absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak on its own
terms rather than through mediated, and co-opted, “art historical” or “cinematic”
formulations/presumptions within the context of cinema studies. Roughly composed of three
narratives/sections Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) progresses by
double inverse movement towards heterogeneous directions, one of which is lunched towards the
future that never arrives, while one inaugurates a past that never was. In doing
so, Foreigner's out(Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) affords the spectators an
impossible theorema: they can not perceive it without having come to the end of the
understanding of the art-culture-history-rights-ethnography-anthropocentric bodies of
knowledge; but, the end of understanding would not come until the end of the film, hence within
the world of Foreigner's out(Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!), becoming is in the
outside; the end is in the beginning, the beginning is positioned in the end; all the definitions are
unsettled; and the deaths are sudden, and in installments at the same time.
What, I feel, redeems Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) in its latest
version, is the simultaneous receptions of the spectacles of displacement/violence, and mourning
where efforts were made
so Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) illustrates tension between
militant aestheticism, and an impure filmic process leading to the effect that Althusser once
described as “ruptural unity,” inventorying the infinity of traces forming a body/body politic,
signaling and framing the moment in which the coexistence of ethics and aesthetics, culture, art,
politics and news become antagonistic; in doing so, of
course Foreigner's out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) is forced to borrow, and
utilize a lexicon of tools taken from the so called contemporary arts, to resist, cinema, and its
discursive aggression.