Propane
Zein Majali
2023

Propane is a collage: a patchwork of digital renders, social media trash, archival and AI footage set to a soundscape of pop music and ASMR. Viewed through the eyes of the eternal and neutralized ‘young girl’, Propane explores the fetishistic power dynamics of Western intervention in the Middle East over the past 100 years, almost to the day. Through Charli XCX and Azaelia Banks vocal samples the work alludes to speed, riffing on the accelerated growth that has taken place in the region since then, exacerbated in recent years by the deterritorializing forces of the internet.

Depicting major political players, e-girls, cyber apparitions, places and non-places, Propane jumps in time. Moving from the creation of Jordan after the British promised and then robbed Arab independence from the Ottomans, the film grapples with ideas of inorganic disruption and “insufficiently imagined nations.” The digital artefact of buffering functions as an analogy of something in a state of becoming.

Zein Majali (b. 1989, Amman, Jordan) is a sound and visual artist whose work examines the collision of technology with rapidly shifting political realities in the postcolonial and globalized Middle East. Through audiovisual performances and installations, she explores how sense-making persists amid narrative collapse and the disorientation of digital life. Majali’s work often intertwines technological aesthetics with affective responses to mediated conflict, constructing sonic and visual spaces that question perception and truth. Her performances have been presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Somerset House, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.