About us

Ellipsis, folds of memory, is a curatorial project curated by Rola Khayyat and Kostana Banovic that brings together artists, filmmakers, and scholars from the Middle East and the Balkans whose works probe, speculate upon, and reclaim archives and narratives in the context of the intimate, hidden. left-over, displaced, suspended and overwritten. This project began at the Kamen residency in 2021, where the two curators, hailing from Bosnia and Lebanon met, and by virtue of their countries’ shared conflicted pasts, together they began to explore the collaborative capacities of thinking through possible futures.
The first iteration of ‘ellipsis, folds of memory’ will converge in Sarajevo: Sept 27 – Oct 1. The participants of this program employ different storytelling techniques, and multidisciplinary practices to articulate hidden narratives and activate untapped stories within spaces of aftermath. Taken together they imbricate creative possibilities in rethinking our past, present and future realities by subverting the singularity of the narrative, and the archive.
The program is structured around three thematic modules; the first journeying through ships and the sea, the second ruminating on ruins and ruination, and the third activating personal narratives. Moving between material and metaphorical objects, ellipsis, folds of memory investigates what produces them, what defines them, and how they impact individuals and cities on levels from the visual and formal to the political and literary.

The curators

Project coordinator