Mona Benyamin - Trouble in Paradise & Moonscape
Mona Benyamin (b.1997, Haifa) is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker, and in 2020, she obtained her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Her works explore intergenerational outlooks on hope, trauma, and questions of identity, using humour and irony as subversive tools of resistance and reflection. In particular, Benyamin’s work translates the emotional and generational repercussions of 73 years under Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine. Well versed in the history of art’s political potential, Benyamin’s practice extends through various mediums consisting of painting, drawing, archival material, and time based media. In her most recent works, Trouble in Paradise and Moonscape, Benyamin collaborates with her family as the main protagonists, staging both films within her immediate surroundings, and using her family home as her only setting.
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Trouble in Paradise is a dysfunctional sitcom set out to explore humor as a mechanism of coping with trauma, pain, and taboos in relation to the Nakba and the Israeli occupation, by posing three sets of jokes ranging from the classical misogynistic genre to anti-jokes and culturally specific humor; in order to examine why Nakba jokes never fully evolved as a genre and entered the Palestinian mainstream.
The main protagonists of the film are the artist’s parents who do not speak English and read the jokes from transliterated title cards and have went through the Nakba (1948) and the Naksa (1967) and never shared their memories from these major events.
Moonscape (2020) is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle of the road song, performed as a duet between a male and female singer, in Arabic. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons, and makes a connection between his story and that of the director's – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible.
The visuals of the film are a hybrid of surrealist scenes from the Arab music industry, reenacted by the artist’s parents who also play the roles of the singers in the film, and film noir; in addition to found footage from the NASA archives, references from canonic films which influenced the art world and show representations of the Moon, and screenshots of Email correspondences with staff members of the Lunar Embassy. All in order to explore the relationship between hope, nostalgia and despair.
*A moonscape is an area or vista of the lunar landscape (generally of the Earth's moon), or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term "moonscape" is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war, often by shelling.
Benyamin’s Moonscape (2020) is currently screening worldwide for free on Another Gaze . Donations to to facilitate medical, legal and infrastructure aid for Palestine can be made through their website here.