For her exhibition at the Secession, Rana Hamadeh (DAI, 2009) is developing a new stage of her long-term growing series, The Destiny Project. Launched in 2020, The Destiny Project explores the production, consumption, circulation, and articulation of desire in contemporary global public discourse. Her evolving animation film Standard_Deviation, ventures into Sophocles’ famed tragedy Oedipus Rex.
September 17–November 7, 2021
Rana Hamadeh’s works are characterized by engulfing delirious sonic and visual environments. In thematic terms, her work is dedicated to an ongoing scrutiny of the epistemologies and technologies of justice. To this end, it examines tropes of violence that find their genealogies in the linguistic, legal, and theatrical infrastructures shaping our understandings of justice.
For her exhibition at the Secession, Rana Hamadeh (DAI, 2009) is developing a new stage of her long-term growing series, The Destiny Project. Launched in 2020, The Destiny Project explores the production, consumption, circulation, and articulation of desire in contemporary global public discourse.
Her evolving animation film Standard_Deviation, which was developed in close cooperation with the artist Sara Hamadeh, ventures into Sophocles’ famed tragedy Oedipus Rex. Rather than re-narrating the misfortunes of Oedipus, king of Thebes, whose grievous journey of self-discovery unfolds at the height of the Theban plague, the work conducts a reading of the dramatic constructs of Sophocles’ play itself—that is, of its figuration of tragedy as a “technology of endurance.” The film sheds new light on the tragedy’s course by placing the age-old characters against a backdrop of various visual and sonic references, non-linear narrative structures, and eerie spaces. The digitally generated film sequences suggest a computer game, visualizing scenarios that are as dreamlike as they are sinister, the action propelled by cogwheels and prostheses. The illusive and chimerical imagery is accompanied by a six-channel cacophonic sound composition specifically spatialized for the exhibition.
Rana Hamadeh was born in Beirut in 1983 and lives and works in Rotterdam.
Sara Hamadeh was born in Beirut in 1991 and lives and works in Rotterdam.
The Destiny Project / Standard_Deviation was commissioned by SCHUNCK (Gemeente Heerlen) and made possible by SCHUNCK (Gemeente Heerlen), steirischer herbst ‘20 and Vienna Secession, with the generous contributions of the Mondriaan Fonds and Gemeente Rotterdam.
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