Origin: Palestine, UK | Documentary | Director: Oraib Toukan | 27 minutes

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When Things Occur is based on Skype conversations with Gazans that were behind the images transmitting from screen to screen in the 2014 Israeli onslaught on Gaza. The film probes the face of mourning and grief—its digital embodiment, transmission, and representation. It asks how the gaze gets channelled digitally, and how empathy travels. What exactly is viewing suffering ‘at a distance’? Who is ‘local’ in the representation of war? And what is the behaviour and political economy of the image of war?

This movie by Oraib Toukan is so compelling due to its update of the urgency to re-engage with the question of the image as a geopolitical issue for the Palestinian cause. Its image-regimes offer a contested terrain as well as a lived reality and politics of the domestic in which ‘nobody will understand how we are living’, as Gaza international photojournalist and blogger Lara Abu Ramadan states in her conversation with Oraib Toukan. The 28 minute desktop-video investigates and labours the techno-spatial conditions of image processing. It considers the particular situation of Gaza after the 2014-wars entangled with global infrastructures. Thus it provides an important analysis of a visually exhausted and exploited terrain that has been overproduced by media images for decades, by Human Rights discourses as well as by the field of international contemporary art, the arena where When Things Occur is presented.

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