2024–2025
double video installation 60′ (30′ each part)
Part 1 (Nadir) – commissioned by steirischer herbst ’24, produced by steirischer herbst ’24, CASKFILMS and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).
Part 2 (Edyta) – commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Visual Culture Research Center, and RIBBON International for the Kyiv Biennial 2025. Co-produced by CASKFILMS and TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol.
Artistic research for both projects commissioned by the Berlin Artistic Research Programme 2022–2023.
Excerpts from student films (Łódź Film School, 1966–1983) are woven into the work, including:
A Lesson 41, Abdellah Dirssi, 1966
Amghar, Mostafa Derkaoui, 1968
Shadow Among Others, Abdelkader Lagtaâ, 1969
Report September, Rupen Vosgimorukian, 1969
Elizabeth, Idriss Karim, 1973
But Hope Is of a Different Color, Abdelkader Lagtaâ, 1972
Wait, Wait, Beverly Joan Marcus, 1978 & 1980
Patrik, Beverly Joan Marcus, 1980
Dear Dad, Laredj Khader, 1983
Cast:
Abdelkader Lagtaâ: Nadir
Marta Ojrzyńska: Edyta
Mateusz Górski: Jarek
Dagmara Bąk: Archivist
Marcin Czarnik: Man I
Grzegorz Falkowski: Man II
Crew:
Writer & Director: Assaf Gruber
Producer: Guillaume Cailleau
Cinematography: Simon Veroneg
Delegate Producers: Aleksander Bilnik (tak mi źle films), Agata Terpiał (Cinescop)
Assistant Director: Moriya Matityahu
Scenography: Maja Pawlikowska
Location Manager: Janusz Dąbkiewicz
Sound recording: Maryla Kłosowska & Anna Lenarcik
Sound design: Jochen Jezussek

Miraculous Accident by Assaf Gruber (b. 1980, Jerusalem) is a double video installation unfolding between 1968 and 2025, exploring how memory, ideology, and intimacy intersect through cinema. Beginning at the Łódź Film School, the work follows Edyta, a Jewish editing teacher exiled during Poland’s political purges in 1968, who forms a charged emotional bond with Nadir, her Moroccan student, and Jarek, her protégé and his closest friend. Their relationship is marked by displacement, asymmetry, and the pressures of political history.
Years later, a letter Edyta sends from Haifa re-emerges, triggering Nadir’s return to Łódź. He begins directing a film that attempts to reconstruct and imagine her life, while also casting new light on his relationship with Jarek, blurring the boundaries between biography and projection. Gruber’s work draws in part on the life of the Moroccan poet and filmmaker Abdelkader Lagtaâ (b. 1949, Casablanca), who plays Nadir in the film, interlacing original footage with film extracts by Lagtaâ’s students and his peers.
Following the artist’s reflections of the way personal narratives intersect broader political structures, love becomes entangled with ideology. Memory is continually refracted through historical rupture, leaving the viewer suspended between what happened, what is remembered, what is imagined, and what might have been.
Assaf Gruber participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Near East Far West (03.10.25–08.01.26) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Part 1: Commissioned by steirischer herbst ’24. Produced by steirischer herbst ’24, CASKFILMS, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).

Part 2: Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Visual Culture Research Center and RIBBON International for the Kyiv Biennial 2025.
Produced by CASKFILMS Co-produced with,tak mi źle films, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol.
Associate Producer Yusuf Ölmez.

Artistic research for both projects was commissioned by Berlin Artistic Research Programme
2022-23.

Excerpts from the following student films, produced at the Łódź Film School between 1966 and
1983, were interwoven into the project:

Part 1:
A Lesson 41, Abdellah Dirssi, 1966
Amghar, Mostafa Derkaoui, 1968
Shadow Among Others, Abdelkader Lagtaâ, 1969
Report September, Rupen Vosgimorukian, 1969
Elizabeth, Idriss Karim, 1973
But Hope Is of a Different Color, Abdelkader Lagtaâ, 1972
Wait, Wait, Beverly Joan Marcus, 1980

Part 2:
Amghar, Mostafa Derkaoui, 1968
Somewhere on a Given Day, Mostafa Derkaoui, 1971
Wait, Wait, Beverly Joan Marcus, 1978
Patrik, Beverly Joan Marcus, 1980
Dear Dad, Laredj Khader, 1983

With:
Abdelkader Lagtaâ: Nadir
Marta Ojrzyńska: Edyta
Mateusz Górski: Jarek
Dagmara Bąk: Archivist
Marcin Czarnik: Man I
Grzegorz Falkowski: Man II

Writer & Director: Assaf Gruber
Producer: Guillaume Cailleau
Cinematography: Simon Veroneg
Delegate producer 1&2: Aleksander Bilnik (tak mi źle films)
Delegate producer 1: Agata Terpiał (Cinescop)
Assistant director: Moriya Matityahu
Scenography: Maja Pawlikowska
Location manager: Janusz Dąbkiewicz
Sound recording: Maryla Kłosowska & Anna Lenarcik
Sound design: Jochen Jezussek

Samia Halaby
Bird Dog, 1987
3:40 min
Land, 1988
1:20 min
Kinetic paintings programmed on an amiga computer, sound

Lighthouse, 1993/2025
6:17 min
The RED CANARY and the grey spider, 1993/2025
2 min
Kinetic paintings produced using the Kinetic Painting Program coded on a PC with a Windows operating system, sound by Kevin Nathaniel and Hasan Bakr
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg
Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a leading figure of contemporary abstraction and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Her digitally-generated kinetic abstractions are grounded in an approach to painting as a temporal experience, where shifting shapes and forms can expand our ways of seeing and thinking.
Composed on a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer in her home in New York City in 1988, Bird Dog and Land are animated works of movement and sound using simple computation instructions. They behave like evolving fields, in which shapes gradually shift, expand, and return. Here, movement, space and time are interdependent concepts, creating a sense of seeing while in motion. Halaby’s practice often draws on nature and historical movements, such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde. In her work Land, iterative expansion and contraction extend into occupation, as forms grow into, edge over, and against one another, evoking shifting territories and control. The artist describes Land as being dedicated to her homeland of Palestine, from which she was exiled during the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians that started in 1948.
This concern continues in the later works such as Lighthouse and. Created using Halaby’s own Kinetic Painting Program, developed specifically for her practice, the pieces use pulsating structures and melodic sounds to suggest a beacon-like rhythm of emergence and dissolution. Interlocking chromatic systems, Halaby stages an encounter between fragile and predatory forms. Painting becomes a lived field where computation, perception, and political space unfold as continuous becoming and site of possibility.