With Traced Patterns, we open up the "Video Dialogues" project for exchange with artists from other regions. The two videos, Ninia Sverdrup (Sweden, based in Berlin): Urban Scene XI: Last Station (2009) and Ammar Al-Beik (Syria, based in Dubai): Jerusalem HD (2007) are set in urban surroundings that seem familiar, yet at the same time intensely alienating. Individuals move around in these spaces, isolated from others, forever searching, never at ease.
Ninia Sverdrup has filmed the entrance to an underground station in Berlin. Passengers go up or down the stairs, and in and out through mirrored doors, almost as if following an unknown pattern. Except from the sound of the passengers’ footsteps, only the wind is heard in this otherwise totally soundless place. Ammar Al-Beik follows a young woman as she restlessly moves through the streets of an ancient Middle Eastern city; traces of her story are hinted at, but never told directly. Like a ghost of the Palestinian exile, she moves on the border between fiction and documentary, dressed in the black colour of mourning, belonging more to the world of the dead than the living.
