Collected Histories is a project co-founded by Hind Mezaina and Jasmine Soliman. Through public film screenings, talks and workshops, co-facilitated with Jon Burr, its aim is to foster discussion on personal documentation and archiving with an ultimate goal of inspiring and supporting individuals to become ‘citizen archivists’ by cataloguing and exploring ways to self-publish and preserve personal collections.

Where do we look for ourselves? Where are we represented? The UAE is often subject to descriptors as ‘fast paced’ and ‘transient’, terms that indicate that lives lived here are elusive, not capturable. This project will explore the importance of archival self-representation, the objects we keep and why. 

This second event will be broken into three sessions:

Short Film Screenings focused on archives, memories, and identity:

Between Delicate and Violent (Şirin Bahar Demirel, 2023, 15 min)

My Father (Pegah Ahangarani Farahanilran, 2023, 19 min) 

At Home But Not At Home (Suneil Sanzgiri, 20219, 11 min) 

Rankin Street, 1953 (Naeem Mohaieman, 2013, 8 min) 

- A Post-screening discussion between Hind Mezaina and Jasmine Soliman with audience participation

- Workshop: Attendees signing up to stay for the workshop will be required to bring at least one item from their personal archive, it could be family photos, letters, diaries, or heirlooms. 

As we did in our first workshop, we will encourage participants to present a personal object or heirloom this time considering objects in relation to one-another. How an object may be described differently or take on another meaning when placed alongside others and how ‘collections’ can be built and understood. We will explore moving from personal frameworks to archival description and what categories our objects may be placed within, with an eye toward archival principles of description thus exploring ways to arrange, describe, and preserve personal archives for both ancestral and community posterity.

We encourage both first-time attendees to bring objects as well as the return of attendees and their objects from the inaugural workshop.

This event is open to all, and no prior knowledge about archival practice is required.

This program builds on a previous edition held in Spring 2025. You can learn more about the earlier event here. 

About the Curators / Founders:

Hind Mezaina is an artist, film curator and writer from Dubai. Her interests lie in cinema, cities, visual culture, collective memory and archives. In 2009 she founded The Culturist blog, and in 2022 she started The Culturist Film Club hosted at various venues across Dubai.
hindmezaina.com

Jasmine Soliman is an archivist, co-founder of Collected Histories, and founder of RepCinema. Her work focuses on documentation, memory work, and digital accessibility - particularly through a neurodivergent lens. She is interested in vernacular and documentary photography, everyday ephemera, cinema history, and mashriq and maghreb heritage. jasminesoliman.com

About the facilitator: 

Jon Burr is an archivist specializing in cultural heritage and digital archive practices, who has helped build the Akkasah Photography Archive and al Mawrid Arab Art Archive at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has a Master’s Degree in Archives and Records Management from the University of Dundee, and his personal research relates to the preservation, digitization, accessing, and sharing of family archives.