December 16 , Thursday, 7:30PM, 2004
Director's Eye with Paul Chan
COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE

BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER Pt.1 51min, 16mm, 1990
Director: Paul Chan


B.I.N.P.O. is an ambient video essay of life in Baghdad before the invasion and occupation. Men dance, women draw and sufis sing as they await the coming of another war. In seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). Subtitled in English. World Premiere at the 2003 MOMA Documentary Fortnight. Part II, website, online at www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad Notes, gifts, promises, paintings, trash, and other ephemera from the city which is now hardly a city. What if Walter Benjamin didn't kill himself, learned html, bought a camera, and thought himself useful enough to work in an impending war zone?

Paul Chan is an artist and director of National Philistine, an online aesthetic think tank. Chan is a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation new media arts fellow. He is represented by the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. His video work is distributed by Video Data Bank and his new media work can be seen at www.nationalphilistine.com Chan spent one month (Dec 2002-Jan 2003) in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq peace team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness, the Nobel Peace prize nominated group working to end the sanctions against Iraq. The goals of IPT are to rally support for resisting the war (and now occupation) on Iraq and publicize the effects of the ongoing US assault on Iraqi civilians.