THE FILMMAKER
Panos Aprahamian is an artist-filmmaker and writer living and working in Beirut. His work in film, text and digital media explores the spectral double-presence of the past and the future in bodies, things, and places. He studied as a Caspian Arts Scholar at The London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. In 2018 Aprahamian participated in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program and is currently an instructor in Fine Arts and Media Studies at The American University of Beirut.

THE RESIDENCY
At BAR, Aprahamian worked on a film essay This Haunting Memory That Is Not My Own drawing upon oral traditions, speculative histories, and climate-fiction in an attempt to explore the spectral presence of traumatic pasts and unknown futures in human and nonhuman bodies, structures, and places. The old imperial order splinters into nascent nations as global flows of capital engulf its former territories, modernizing industry, intensifying nationalism, and enhancing paranoia. Sericulture uproots old social relations, contributing to the arbitrary redrawing of borders, inviting women to the workforce and girls into the factory. Silk arrives from ancient futures as a catalyzing agent of accelerated modernization, reworking the old model into the novel state, solidified through mass death and displacement, as new taxonomies codify bodies and new peripheries emerge.