Dead As A Dodo
Leena Habiballa
2022
Dead As A Dodo lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction. By drawing on archival material and the Dodo’s apparition the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise. This work is inspired by and is in conversation with a book of poems titled A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous.
Leena Habiballa (b. 1993, Khartoum, Sudan) is an artist and cultural worker whose practice spans moving image and experimental analogue processes. She investigates Sudanese visual and material cultures, collaborative community filmmaking, and archival practices that subvert state and colonial ideologies. Through counter-archival readings, her work reimagines histories beyond a colonial imagination, forging new connections between past and present. Habiballa is Co-Director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative specializing in analogue film. Her works have been shown at Grand Union (Birmingham), Filma Feminist Film Festival (Kyiv), MENA Film Festival (Vancouver), Kurzfilmfestival Köln, and Scribe Video Center (Philadelphia). Her writing has appeared in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Monthly, the Danish Film Institute, and LUX.