Join artist Panos Aprahamian and Art Jameel Curator Indranjan Banerjee for a conversation around ‘The Karantina Trilogy‘, three films made between 2021 and 2025 that trace the ecology, memory, and contested histories of Karantina, Beirut’s former quarantine district.

Situated at the mouth of the Beirut River, Karantina occupies a liminal position at the heart of the city and outside its purview, witness to overlapping histories of political and ecological violence. Across the trilogy, Aprahamian moves between documentary and fiction to examine forms of extraction inflicted on human and nonhuman bodies, and on the city’s waterways.

This talk accompanies the screening of the trilogy at Jameel Arts Centre.

More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water is produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, in collaboration with Museu Tàpies, Barcelona; Art Jameel, Dubai; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; WIELS, Brussels, and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE), Naples. 

Panos Aprahamian (b. 1986) is a Berlin-based unfiction filmmaker, media artist and writer from Beirut’s peripheral rustbelt. Through image, sound and language, his practice explores the spectral presence of the future-past in undead bodies, sacrifice zones and social relations. He studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and the University of the Arts London, graduating with an MA in Documentary Film in 2015. Aprahamian was a Caspian Arts scholar in 2015 and a fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program between 2017 and 2018. He is the winner of the Ecumenical Prize at the 2022 Oberhausen Short Film Festival, recipient of the Eliza Moore fellowship for artistic excellence in 2024, and the Han Nefkens Foundation—Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art grantee for the 2024-2026 cycle. He currently teaches at the American University of Beirut in the Media Studies Program.