Filmvisning och samtal med Amin Zouiten

Interrogating the Colonial Gaze: Film Screening and Talk with Amin Zouiten

Welcome to a film screening with the artist and filmmaker Amin Zouiten, who will present three films and have a conversation with filmmaker William Dalenson afterwards. The screening is based on Zouiten's exploration of historical reference points and institutional representations, particularly in relation to travel writings as fiction.

The screening is organized in conjunction with the public programming of the project 'Bringing Objects to Life and Challenging the Museums' Colonial Histories.' The program begins with an introduction by Didem Yildirim, project manager at the World Culture Museums.

Vom Nil, 2025, 2K video, 14:20 min, stereo sound

In Vom Nil, the camera returns to places in Egypt that were photographed by Queen Victoria of Baden (1862–1930), one of Sweden's first amateur photographers whose collections are held in the Bernadotte Library. Vom Nil is named after Baden's travelogue from 1892 and follows the locations in her photographs, from Port Said to Abu Simbel—a journey reflecting the rise of mass tourism. After the completion of the Suez Canal and the dissolution of the British occupation of Egypt, travel companies consolidated the colonial routes, establishing the pathways through which "Egypt" would be experienced within a Western imaginary. The film re-depicts the peripheries of these well-documented places and reformulates them for an estranged 21st century.

Schibah, Nils, Katrine, 2025, 16mm to HD-projection, 2 min, silent

In the tableau, a lone camel appears on black-and-white 16mm film, situated beyond any specific geography or time. The scene was shot on Öland's alvar and serves as an allusion to David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl's (1628–1698) painting Camel with Driver (1688), which depicts the animal and its attendant in a landscape reminiscent of a fantasized Saharan topography.

The Secret of the Desert, 16mm to HD-video, 3 min

The Secret of the Desert borrows its title from the silent film by Robert Dinesen from 1918. The now lost film is traced at its approximate location of Råbjerg Mile in Northern Jutland, Denmark; northern Europe's largest migrating sand dune.

This rendition of The Secret of the Desert, filmed on black and white 16mm with the playing length of about a standard roll of 100-meter film, is working within the rifts of the 1918's original fiction. That, like the roving desert, is itself now geographically lost in the shifting sands of Northern Jutland; both reproducing tropes of desert landscapes while the surroundings of the Scandinavian "desert" slowly creeps in. Footage from Råbjerg Mile is juxtaposed with the few existing production stills of Robert Dinesen's films, together with an appropriated soundscape based on 1920's Hollywood films set in Egypt.

**Biography **

Amin Zouiten is a Swedish-Moroccan artist and filmmaker, educated at the Malmö Art Academy and Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. In 2024, he was a Bernadotte scholarship recipient at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. His works and films have been shown at venues including the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Skåne Art Society, Gothenburg Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Malmö Konsthall, ISSUES Gallery, Stockholm Film Festival, Rencontres Paris/Berlin, and Uppsala Short Film Festival.