Jane Benson: Two Videos

Jane Benson’s poignant two-channel video Finding Baghdad is about geo-cultural displacement, a topic particularly relevant today in the wake of the largest mass migration since World War II.

The video features two Iraqi brothers who escaped from Baghdad in the early 2000s; one to Cologne, Germany and the other to Sanad, Bahrain. The video begins with images of two traditional Iraqi instruments, an oud and a djoze, as they are split into two parts. The brothers play a duet, originally streamed over Skype, on their halves of the instruments that is shown on two separate screens. The distance between the brothers is poetically bridged if only for a moment.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website