NC Film Club: Joshua Whitaker presents Location Hunting in Palestine

Wednesday 19 February, 2025
6.40 - 8pm, Cinema 1

£6 full price / £4 concession / Free for those on income support

This event accompanies the New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA.

Between the 27th of June and the 11th of July 1963 Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled through Palestine with the Catholic Priest and biblical scholar Don Andrea Carraro. The purpose of the trip was to investigate the possibility of using the original sites of Jesus’s life in his forthcoming film The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

In the film’s opening scenes, Pasolini voices his exceptions for filming there in grave terms: ‘Already at this point, I started to suspect, that there was something too modern, too industrialised in this landscape. In fact, in a few minutes, as you follow our Fiat's route… you'll see a landscape contaminated by the present'.⁠

The screening of Location Hunting in Palestine will be introduced by Joshua Whitaker, reflecting on the nature of pilgrimage, sacredness, and atemporality in Pasolini’s filmmaking and as a methodology for his own academic and artistic practice.

The Artist

Joshua Whitakeris an artist working with text, print, video, photography and painting. His work engages with ideas of history, humour, cinema, and esoteric belief as key to describing forms of apocalypse and political futurity. Recent lectures, performances, texts, and exhibitions include: Acid History— Into the Silver Screen, The Hellenic Centre London (2024); Acid History, The British School at Athens (2023); Critical Spirituality in St. Paul and the Delphic Oracle, Apocalyptic Times Conference, University of Exeter (2023); Pier Paolo, Soanyway Magazine REDUX Issue (2022); Useful Work Vs. Useless Toil, Bloc Projects, Sheffield (2018); WAR II MOSTYN, Llandudno (2016); Serge de Nîmes, Michelangelo, Mayhem Totes, The Death Suite…, CBS Gallery, Liverpool (2016); The Kippenberger Challenge 7.45 Books, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Rijksakademie Library and De Appel, Amsterdam (2016); St. Paul, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, Leeds (2015).