REMAN SADANILet the River Flow

The exhibition brings together two moving image works that return to the city of Mosul through home videos, field recordings and community archives. Mouthwash (2014), the artist’s first moving image work, is revisited here in a new edit. Made from phone footage and voice messages received during the first months of the ISIS siege of Mosul, the work becomes a diary whose buried meanings continue to surface over time.

Presented on a loop, Mouthwash is accompanied by a new work, Let the River Flow (2026), which begins with the sound of the Tigris River as a gesture of washing away and release. It then moves into a search through family and community archives for images of women gathered by the water, opening onto stories of labour and encounters with mythical creatures.

Together, the works ask what it means to rearrange, withhold and care for images when personal and community archives have been repeatedly displaced by precarious lived realities. They ask who holds the labour of preserving images, and who carries them into the future.

Reman Sadani is a London-based moving image artist and cultural practitioner. Her practice explores the social histories of moving image production, distribution, and preservation. She also works with Cinenova, an organisation dedicated to preserving and distributing feminist film and video.