Larissa Sansour Features in Group Exhibition at the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University in Qatar

The Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University in Qatar presents What’s between, between? in spring 2026, a major exhibition exploring speculative futures of the Gulf region through art, media, and technology. Curated by Jack Thomas Taylor, Curator of Art, Media and Technology, and Amal Zeyad Ali, Assistant Curator, the exhibition runs from 26 January to 14 May 2026 and examines “Gulf Futurism” as a framework for understanding histories, imaginaries, and contested futures shaped by rapid transformation and lived experience.

 

Within this context, Larissa Sansour presents A Space Exodus (2009), a five-minute short film that reimagines Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey through a distinctly Middle Eastern political lens. Drawing on the visual language and narrative structure of the iconic science-fiction film, Sansour replaces its orchestral score with arabesque compositions, creating a surreal and culturally charged cinematic experience that blurs homage and critique.

 

The film follows Sansour herself on a phantasmagoric journey through outer space, echoing Kubrick’s meditations on human evolution, technology, and progress while sharply reframing them through questions of displacement, sovereignty, and belonging. By envisioning the first Palestinian in space, Sansour subverts the triumphalist narrative of space exploration, reinterpreting Neil Armstrong’s historic words as “a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind.” The gesture is both ironic and poignant, positioning space as a site where political realities on Earth are suspended, yet inescapably present.

 

Situated within an exhibition structured around metaphors of salt, atmospheric layers, and shifting temporal scales, A Space Exodus resonates with What’s between, between?’s broader inquiry into the tensions between tradition and hyper-modernity, human and machine, memory and futurity. Sansour’s work ultimately proposes speculative fiction as a critical tool—one that opens space for imagining futures beyond imposed boundaries, while exposing the persistent structures of power that shape them.