Dicky Bahto
2021A note on the ruins for visitors
Dicky Bahto
A note on the ruins for visitors is a deeply personal portrait of the Assyrian community from fragments of material drawn from Bahto’s family history, ancient artifacts, and collaborations with contemporary artists working across the diaspora. “When Daesh invaded Iraq and released videos of themselves destroying ancient Assyrian artworks in the Mosul Museum,” Bahto explains, “I found myself thinking more deeply about my relationship to history as the grandchild of survivors of Seyfo – the Assyrian genocide. In fact, I realized that the genocide hadn’t ended.” The film investigates the materiality of cultural memory alongside its personal and spiritual dimensions, embodying the rebuilding of a community and connection to culture that honors the past while insisting on an open future.
A note on the ruins for visitors
What's a Life? (Tio's Remix)
Dicky Bahto
"What's a Life?" is a project that developed over the course of a few years incorporating material recorded on Super 8 film, cell phone video, and audio recordings. The recordings are a mix of portraits of musicians as well as diary material focused on sound and music. While the project was "alive" and I was still accumulating new material, I would present it as a multimedia installation or as expanded cinema performances involving multiple television screens, video and Super 8 projection, cassette tapes, and mp3 audio playback, editing the material anew for each presentation and incorporating varying amounts of chance and site-specificity into each version. After a few years of letting the work live, breath, and grow, I decided to stop it's life in this form, and have since edited an hour and a half long single channel video work, some sections of which (the one you are seeing now for instance) may be shown independently.
What's a Life? (Tio's Remix)
