BIO
Known mononymously as Siska, the Beirut-born, Berlin-based artist and filmmaker works across disciplines as an educator and curator. As a culturalworker his aim is to offer critical explorations of themes such as memory, exile, trauma, identity and politics. His current focus is on postcolonial and cultural narratives with the theoretical and practical parallels between archival and archaeological practices. It is common for his work to take the form of extended cinema where he applies cinematic codes as well as film language in order to explore various visual narrative techniques. A key figure in the early Beiruti graffiti scene, Siska has also produced and performed music as part of the Lebanese Hip Hop group Kitaa Beirut قطاع بیروت.
His experience lies in curatorial work, visual dramaturgy, community organisation and long-term, research-based artistic projects. In practice, this means working across disciplines and contexts and focusing on how projects are developed, who is involved, and how people can take part. Over many years he has developed projects at the crossroads of art, education and urban public space, working with local communities, schools, asylum seekers, students, artists, social researchers, musicians, writers and neighborhood initiatives, with inclusion and accessibility as practical concerns that shape how each project is planned and carried out. As a curator he focuses on offering stage & spaces of visibility that arise from real needs rather than only spectacle, curatorial trends or administrative policies. His academic training is in Audio-Visual Arts and Filmmaking, in which he earned a Master’s degree in 2008 from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, École de Cinéma. He is currently the artitic director and curator of the Alternative Monument, an AR memorial to migartion in Berlin. Additionally, Siska has collaborated on numerous performance and music productions, taking a midpoint between his career as a visual artist and performance artist. In 2022, he completed his residency and fellowship at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. In 2025, he received the nGbK Art in the Underground Prize. Siska's work has been internationally shown, including Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Halle 14 (Leipzig), Paris 104 (Paris), Beirut Art Center (Beirut), Mosaic Rooms (London), Dada (Marrakech), Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) and Silent Green Kulturquartier (Berlin) among others...
Further details on recent projects can be found through the links embedded in the text below:
In 2025, Siska developed in collaboration with Franziska Pierwoss Soundtrax for a Bazaar ($on’ny Music), combining live performance, music, and archival research to revive the cultural memory of Berlin’s Turkish Bazaar at the U2 Bülowstrasse subway station. From 2024 to 2025, Still Waters Run Deep, a 16mm film and performative intervention, explored water as a discursive metaphor and lexicon of migration, linking Liverpool’s history with collective memory. In 2024 he became the artistic director and curator of Alternative Monument also know as Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland or ADfD, an Augmented Reality Memorial commemorating migration in Berlin that included workshops and public talks at Spore Initiative between other. In 2023, Port Fiction, including The Last of a Time, used archival research and interviews to document the Beirut port explosion and its aftermath (read article with siska here). From 2009, Das Kino Projekt a travelling movie theater that merged archives, installation, and experimental screenings across cities. Sunnosphere (2022) a musical concert and installation reflected on spatial histories and experimental music collaboration with composer Alexander Hawkins. Latent Border(s) (2019) examined migration and border politics between Beirut and Berlin. In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios (2017) explored Lebanon’s lost cinematic heritage and the parallelism between film archiving and archaeology . EDL (2011) documented Beirut’s electricity building as a site of modernization and ongoing social conflict. At the Haus der Statistics in Berlin in August-2021, he co-curated a series of conversations, films, readings, and live performances as the artistic director of redeem ردیم, a platform for ongoing conversations between voices from Beirut in Berlin.
LATENT BORDER (S)
Latent Borde(s) looks at the history of borders that is very much inherent to the physicality of film. It tackles the divisions and the micro-economies they generate and sheds light on modern history and issues related to illegal migration...Latent Borde(s) was first commisioned by Gropius Bau for the exhbition Walking through Walls in 2019 and was recently shown in Halle 14 in Leipzig part of the exhibition Distant Divides a long-term research project that explores the artistic exchange between Lebanon and Germany.
The work is about the ruination of film heritage navigated through Lebanon's cinematic heydays of the late 60s and early 70s - a period that witnessed a rise of Egyptian producers and directors moving to Lebanon to make films partly due to Nasser's nationalization of the Egyptian cinema. Filmed between Beirut, Tripoli, Baalbeck, Casablanca and Los Angeles, In the ruins of Baalbeck studios creates parallels between film archiving and archeology. The film takes us back to a forgotten era of film making, shedding light on how cinema was and is perceived and how parts of history can be erased as a result of wilful neglect. The story evolves around one of the biggest production studios in the Arab world and its lost archive. Studio Baalbeck was a Lebanese production house that formed the heart of the film industry in the 60s and was subsequently destroyed during the civil war. After its premiere at the 2018 Berlinale Film Festival, In the ruins of Baalbeck studios was developped into a multimedia installation.
E.D.L شركة كهرباء لبنان
Lost in time and translation, images transport us on a journey behind the modernist facade of Beirut’s electricity building. The work portrays Lebanon’s National Electricity building as an homage to a once modernist project linked to the very construction of Lebanon’s modern state...
REDEEM رديم
redeem رديم is a platform for ongoing conversations between voices from Beirut in Berlin and peers around the world. It acts upon a collaborative desire to amplify and deepen an already existing exchange between cultural workers who lived and worked in Lebanon before the country spiraled into its current economic and political void...Following a week-long workshop at Künstlerhof Frohnau in June 2021, this community created an event at Haus der Statistik in August 2021 in Berlin where a line-up of talks, films, music, readings and live performances took place. The main venue was located in Haus A facing Karl-Marx-Allee, selected programs and all films screenings took place in the magic bumper car turned cinema (Autoskino) behind the building.
DAS KINO PROJEKT مشروع سينما
Das Kino Projekt (The cinema project) is an in situ traveling cinema that deals with local archives and issues of cultural memory. It could be considered as research, installation, archive and gallery or none of all these terms and simply as homage to the endangered cinema culture...Das Kino Projekt started in Beirut and travelled to many cities including Naples, Minneapolis, Zürich, Cologne and recently Berlin. In 2011 das Kino Projekt traveled to Aleppo and, due to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, could not be realized on site and has not been until today. In March 2022 das Kino Projekt took place in Berlin as a drive-in cinema showing a rich program with a special focus on Syria, Lebanon, and the MENA region.
COLOR CLUB LAB كولور كلوب لاب
Color club is an artist run film laboratory for analogue film processing based in Beirut and Berlin. Color Club Lab is a workshop module that investigates analogue film practices and teaches the know-hows of hand processing, 8mm & 16mm moving image as well as 35mm still photography...at the moment the Lab is installed in the old kitchen of an ex-hospital in the Neubau at Künstlerhof Frohnau in Berlin.
DIE GESPENSTEREI 2
The in-camera-edited images are investigating how places, built in a modern spirit architecture in pre-Nazi Germany and that later served as a stage for personal encounters, weekend strolls or official gatherings, were thus made part of different political realities that possibly shaped our present perception of them...
GOLDEN RUSH غولدن راشّ
Gold Rush was the name of a ‘super night club’ that once existed in Ain El Mreisseh in Beirut. The film Golden Rush explores the city of Beirut and the surge of people that move and vanish within it, using a language that evokes dream, traffic, seduction, and disappearance...
A TRAGIC TALE OF FIRE WATER & RADON
Shot in Bad Gastein (Austria) inside the local Congress Center, a modernist concrete building with red interior, built in the 1960's by Gerhard Garstenauer that has been deserted since the 1990s. A city that once used to serve as a hotspot for aristocrats and politics since its emergence as a spa location during the 18th and 19th century...
BIO سيرة
Siska is a visual artist and a filmmaker born in Beirut, based in Berlin. His practice is often centered on archaeology examining sociopolitical narratives in relation to personal and collective pasts.His use of film language and codes of cinematography, as strategic mediations to activate an archive, allows him to experiment with new forms of storytelling and his own biography...
PRINTS
CV
SISKA - 2023
Known mononymously as Siska, the Beirut-born, Berlin-based artist and filmmaker works across disciplines as an educator and curator. As a culturalworker his aim is to offer critical explorations of themes such as memory, exile, trauma, identity and politics. His current focus is on postcolonial and cultural narratives with the theoretical and practical parallels between archival and archaeological practices. It is common for his work to take the form of extended cinema where he applies cinematic codes as well as film language in order to explore various visual narrative techniques. A key figure in the early Beiruti graffiti scene, Siska has also produced and performed music as part of the Lebanese Hip Hop group Kitaa Beirut قطاع بیروت.
His experience lies in curatorial work, visual dramaturgy, community organisation and long-term, research-based artistic projects. In practice, this means working across disciplines and contexts and focusing on how projects are developed, who is involved, and how people can take part. Over many years he has developed projects at the crossroads of art, education and urban public space, working with local communities, schools, asylum seekers, students, artists, social researchers, musicians, writers and neighborhood initiatives, with inclusion and accessibility as practical concerns that shape how each project is planned and carried out. As a curator he focuses on offering stage & spaces of visibility that arise from real needs rather than only spectacle, curatorial trends or administrative policies. His academic training is in Audio-Visual Arts and Filmmaking, in which he earned a Master’s degree in 2008 from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, École de Cinéma. He is currently the artitic director and curator of the Alternative Monument, an AR memorial to migartion in Berlin. Additionally, Siska has collaborated on numerous performance and music productions, taking a midpoint between his career as a visual artist and performance artist. In 2022, he completed his residency and fellowship at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. In 2025, he received the nGbK Art in the Underground Prize. Siska's work has been internationally shown, including Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Halle 14 (Leipzig), Paris 104 (Paris), Beirut Art Center (Beirut), Mosaic Rooms (London), Dada (Marrakech), Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) and Silent Green Kulturquartier (Berlin) among others...
Further details on recent projects can be found through the links embedded in the text below:
In 2025, Siska developed in collaboration with Franziska Pierwoss Soundtrax for a Bazaar ($on’ny Music), combining live performance, music, and archival research to revive the cultural memory of Berlin’s Turkish Bazaar at the U2 Bülowstrasse subway station. From 2024 to 2025, Still Waters Run Deep, a 16mm film and performative intervention, explored water as a discursive metaphor and lexicon of migration, linking Liverpool’s history with collective memory. In 2024 he became the artistic director and curator of Alternative Monument also know as Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland or ADfD, an Augmented Reality Memorial commemorating migration in Berlin that included workshops and public talks at Spore Initiative between other. In 2023, Port Fiction, including The Last of a Time, used archival research and interviews to document the Beirut port explosion and its aftermath (read article with siska here). From 2009, Das Kino Projekt a travelling movie theater that merged archives, installation, and experimental screenings across cities. Sunnosphere (2022) a musical concert and installation reflected on spatial histories and experimental music collaboration with composer Alexander Hawkins. Latent Border(s) (2019) examined migration and border politics between Beirut and Berlin. In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios (2017) explored Lebanon’s lost cinematic heritage and the parallelism between film archiving and archaeology . EDL (2011) documented Beirut’s electricity building as a site of modernization and ongoing social conflict. At the Haus der Statistics in Berlin in August-2021, he co-curated a series of conversations, films, readings, and live performances as the artistic director of redeem ردیم, a platform for ongoing conversations between voices from Beirut in Berlin.
LATENT BORDER (S)
Latent Borde(s) looks at the history of borders that is very much inherent to the physicality of film. It tackles the divisions and the micro-economies they generate and sheds light on modern history and issues related to illegal migration...Latent Borde(s) was first commisioned by Gropius Bau for the exhbition Walking through Walls in 2019 and was recently shown in Halle 14 in Leipzig part of the exhibition Distant Divides a long-term research project that explores the artistic exchange between Lebanon and Germany.
The work is about the ruination of film heritage navigated through Lebanon's cinematic heydays of the late 60s and early 70s - a period that witnessed a rise of Egyptian producers and directors moving to Lebanon to make films partly due to Nasser's nationalization of the Egyptian cinema. Filmed between Beirut, Tripoli, Baalbeck, Casablanca and Los Angeles, In the ruins of Baalbeck studios creates parallels between film archiving and archeology. The film takes us back to a forgotten era of film making, shedding light on how cinema was and is perceived and how parts of history can be erased as a result of wilful neglect. The story evolves around one of the biggest production studios in the Arab world and its lost archive. Studio Baalbeck was a Lebanese production house that formed the heart of the film industry in the 60s and was subsequently destroyed during the civil war. After its premiere at the 2018 Berlinale Film Festival, In the ruins of Baalbeck studios was developped into a multimedia installation.
E.D.L شركة كهرباء لبنان
Lost in time and translation, images transport us on a journey behind the modernist facade of Beirut’s electricity building. The work portrays Lebanon’s National Electricity building as an homage to a once modernist project linked to the very construction of Lebanon’s modern state...
REDEEM رديم
redeem رديم is a platform for ongoing conversations between voices from Beirut in Berlin and peers around the world. It acts upon a collaborative desire to amplify and deepen an already existing exchange between cultural workers who lived and worked in Lebanon before the country spiraled into its current economic and political void...Following a week-long workshop at Künstlerhof Frohnau in June 2021, this community created an event at Haus der Statistik in August 2021 in Berlin where a line-up of talks, films, music, readings and live performances took place. The main venue was located in Haus A facing Karl-Marx-Allee, selected programs and all films screenings took place in the magic bumper car turned cinema (Autoskino) behind the building.
DAS KINO PROJEKT مشروع سينما
Das Kino Projekt (The cinema project) is an in situ traveling cinema that deals with local archives and issues of cultural memory. It could be considered as research, installation, archive and gallery or none of all these terms and simply as homage to the endangered cinema culture...Das Kino Projekt started in Beirut and travelled to many cities including Naples, Minneapolis, Zürich, Cologne and recently Berlin. In 2011 das Kino Projekt traveled to Aleppo and, due to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, could not be realized on site and has not been until today. In March 2022 das Kino Projekt took place in Berlin as a drive-in cinema showing a rich program with a special focus on Syria, Lebanon, and the MENA region.
COLOR CLUB LAB كولور كلوب لاب
Color club is an artist run film laboratory for analogue film processing based in Beirut and Berlin. Color Club Lab is a workshop module that investigates analogue film practices and teaches the know-hows of hand processing, 8mm & 16mm moving image as well as 35mm still photography...at the moment the Lab is installed in the old kitchen of an ex-hospital in the Neubau at Künstlerhof Frohnau in Berlin.
DIE GESPENSTEREI 2
The in-camera-edited images are investigating how places, built in a modern spirit architecture in pre-Nazi Germany and that later served as a stage for personal encounters, weekend strolls or official gatherings, were thus made part of different political realities that possibly shaped our present perception of them...
GOLDEN RUSH غولدن راشّ
Gold Rush was the name of a ‘super night club’ that once existed in Ain El Mreisseh in Beirut. The film Golden Rush explores the city of Beirut and the surge of people that move and vanish within it, using a language that evokes dream, traffic, seduction, and disappearance...
A TRAGIC TALE OF FIRE WATER & RADON
Shot in Bad Gastein (Austria) inside the local Congress Center, a modernist concrete building with red interior, built in the 1960's by Gerhard Garstenauer that has been deserted since the 1990s. A city that once used to serve as a hotspot for aristocrats and politics since its emergence as a spa location during the 18th and 19th century...
BIO سيرة
Siska is a visual artist and a filmmaker born in Beirut, based in Berlin. His practice is often centered on archaeology examining sociopolitical narratives in relation to personal and collective pasts.His use of film language and codes of cinematography, as strategic mediations to activate an archive, allows him to experiment with new forms of storytelling and his own biography...
PRINTS
CV
SISKA - 2023