Jalal Toufic is a prolific writer, film theorist and video artist. Through images from the yearly Shiite ritual Ashoura commemorating the slaughter of the grandson of Mohammed in 680, Jalal’s two-channel video Ashoura: This Blood Spilled In My Veins (1996) “probes the function of the preservation of the image in the digital era, the era of the loss of (generation) loss.” (J.T.) Jalal will also read selected writings.

Christian Keathley is a writer and film/video artist living in Iowa. Snapshots (1996) is a multi-screen film/video work which proposes a mystery: within a few decades in the mid-nineteenth century photography was invented, physiologies became the first mass market paperback books, and Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first detective stories. What connects these events? And what does Memphis–home of Elvis–have to do with it all?