Screening of ḤARĀM and Discussion

Date: 4 May 2019, Saturday
Time: 19:00

The screening of Cynthia Madansky’s film ḤARĀM, which is currently being shown at the exhibition “Shared Sacred Sites”, will be followed by a discussion between the filmmaker and associate professor İlker Aytürk.

ḤARĀM is an essay film portraying the urgent contemporary situation at the Haram Al Sharif/ Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jerusalem reflecting on the growing Temple Mount Faithful movement whose goal is to build the Jewish Third Temple on this holy landscape and in turn to assert Jewish sovereignty over this holy Muslim site.

The current legal status of holy sites in Israel and the Occupied Territories is a source of contention. This is evident even in the naming of the most important site among all others, Haram Al Sharif for Muslims and the Temple Mount for Jews. Following the screening of Haram, Cynthia Madansky and İlker Aytürk will discuss socio-political implications of the attempts at altering the status of religious sites for religio-political ends by referring to the Temple Mount Faithful Movement as an instance of this trend.

ḤARĀM
A film by Cynthia Madansky
16mm, 42 min. 2017
Hebrew, Arabic, English with Turkish subtitles

Cynthia Madansky is an award winning filmmaker and painter. Her films integrate hybrid forms of cinematic traditions including autobiography, experimental methodologies, cinema verité, scripted narrative, ethnographic observation as well as dance and performance. Using 16mm, super 8 and video, her films portray the consequences of politics on the daily lives of individuals, interrogating the concept of personal responsibility and national accountability. Over a period of thirty years she has produced 28 films that have been presented as single channel films and multi-screen installations and projections. Her films have screened at international museums, art spaces and festivals.

İlker Aytürk is associate professor of political science at Bilkent University, Ankara. His research interests include Israeli and Turkish politics with a current focus on far right movements. He was a visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, invited professor at the EHESS, Paris and a Fulbright scholar at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on far right anti-Semitism in Turkey between 1945 and 1980.