Dana Dawud: Reimagining the Possibilities of Cinema

Dana Dawud doesn’t see the internet as an escape from art, but as its unfinished frontier. The Palestinian artist and writer moves across mediums with the ease of someone who knows that boundaries no longer exist in the traditional sense. Whether trailblazing as her SoundCloud alter ego pleasure helmet or through her AI art project angelvapemp3, Dawud’s practice stretches the limits of form, reaching people far beyond the walls of conventional institutions.

“My desire has always been to connect and touch people through art beyond the bounds of geography, the gallery, and the institution,” she tells Dazed MENA. “I exist online because I believe the contemporary artist should have a porous relationship with their audience, fellow collaborators, and networked cultures.”

For Dawud, that porosity has become a practice of its own. Her ongoing Open Secret project, a touring screening and event series featuring emerging and post-net artists, has resonated with many navigating our slop-ravaged, late-stage capitalist online dystopia, morphing and expanding with each day. “Open Secret resulted organically from years of networking and building our online art across geographies,” she says. “We’ve had over 70 screenings since 2024 across the entire world. That is love.”

Her most recent film, Monad, captures that same sense of motion. It layers webcam footage, projection mapping, and texting within a temporal collage that reformulates itself with each screening until, as Dawud explains, it becomes “fully saturated or until submarine internet cables stop working, whichever comes first”. It’s a poetic, poignant way of framing her work’s central tension: how do you build intimacy within a machine? “Art can’t save the world,” she muses. “Art can save art from art. I just want people to know that they are seen.”

Dawud’s influences range from Chantal Akerman and Chris Kraus to Jacques Rivette and Simone Weil, but what ties them together is a sense of devotion to observation, to the texture of the everyday and the experimental. Her projects expand the cinematic into the personal, the networked, and the fragmentary. “The internet has birthed languages, images, and sounds that call for cinematic attention,” she reflects. “Fashion and music have already embraced this new terrain. Now, cinema must find its way into the conversation.”

Rooted in the SWANA region but never bound by it, Dawud’s work carries a sense of shared imagination, a reminder that experimentation can still be communal. “My collaborative projects bring together creatives from the region, engaging with the political and social issues that shape our shared context.” And despite having made strides in recent months, the artist is not slowing down. 

She is already deep into the next iteration of Monad, this time involving “2hollis clones, the selfie, ChatGPT, Nettspend, blurring, museums, and more”. Her description is characteristically cryptic, much like her work, an ever-expanding constellation of images and ideas that resist finality. Dawud may not change the world, but she will keep us alert to how the world might still be seen, expanding the boundaries of what cinema can be.