Mohammad Salemy

Mohammad Salemy is an artist, critic and independent curator based in Berlin and originally from Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Emily Carr University and a Master's degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. His work has been presented in various international contexts, including Ashkal Alwan's Home Works 7 (Beirut, 2015), Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 2015) and Robot Love (Eindhoven, 2018). As a writer, he has contributed to publications such as e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, Brooklyn Rail, Ocula, Arts of the Working Class and Spike. His curatorial project For Machine Use Only was part of the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016). He is a founding member and organiser of the art collective Alphabet Collection, whose composition varies over time. Since 2014, he has also been the organiser and central figure of The New Centre for Research & Practice, where he serves as editor-in-chief of its publishing label, Triple Ampersand (&&&). He is the editor of the publications For Machine Use Only: Contemplations on Algorithmic Epistemology (&&&, 2016) and Model is the Message: Incredible Machines Conference 2022 (&&&, 2023).

Masterclass
Computational Contemplation: Cinema in the Eyes of AI 

14:OCT 16h00—17h00 60'
Batalha Centro de Cinema

This masterclass introduces the concepts that informed the making of The Burg of Babel, a film installation by artist Mohammad Salemy that explores the entanglements of myth, art, media, time, and memory through a speculative narrative set in the port of Beirut. Framed around the fictional smuggling of Pieter Bruegel’s lost original sketch for his Tower of Babel paintings, the film investigates the relationship between collective intelligence and the limits of its capture by historical, technological, and political systems.

Structured as a 25-channel analog installation arranged in a 5×5 grid, the work spatializes time by compressing the full 25-minute film into a single minute of simultaneous display—each channel offset by one-minute intervals. This compositional strategy becomes a metaphor for how artificial intelligence approaches human time and, by extension, its contemplation of human art forms such as cinema. In contrast, the viewer’s experience of the installation offers an alternative temporal encounter: by navigating the grid with their gaze, viewers effectively rewind, fast-forward, stretch, or fragment time through perceptual movement and attention.

Through this innovative format, Salemy draws connections between the speculative aura of Bruegel’s paintings (as highlighted in the artist’s retrospective at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum), the tragic events of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and the mythic failure of Babel as a symbol of fractured human communication. The result is a mosaic of opacity—an oblique archive that resists resolution, offering instead a new cinematic grammar for reflecting on the elusive dynamics of collective thought.

Masterclass Registration

Video Installation
The Burg of babel 

Inauguração
13:OUT 19h00 Galeria Nuno Centeno

A Video Instalação estará patente de:
13–18:OUT
10:00–19:00

The hyperstitional smuggling of the lost Bruegel's original sketch of his two versions of Tower of Babel paintings (normally housed in Vienna and Rotterdam), which were brought together in the artist's retrospective at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, becomes the material form to contemplate the nature of collective general intelligence and its counterintuitive correlations with an expanded but flattened notion of computational time.