EVENT: MALAZ USTA (SEPTEMBER 18–OCTOBER 1 2026)

Space_invaders.exe

video and video game-based moving image, colour and black-and-white, sound, single screen, 11 min, The Netherlands / Syria, 2024

created by Malaz Usta

space_invaders.exe places the visual grammar of arcade threat alongside the bureaucratic demand that displaced people account for themselves. The film confronts imagined exiles with questions drawn from Usta’s own diary and lived encounters, asking them to explain lives and plans shaped by conditions beyond their control. The title invokes Taito’s Space Invaders, while the work routes exile through Grand Theft Auto IV and the playable figure of Niko Bellic, turning the videogame avatar into a model for the pressures of legibility, agency and enforced narrative. Archival footage and game imagery occupy the same unstable register, so that documentary evidence can begin to resemble simulation while the game world acquires the force of an administrative fiction. Usta treats the interview as a confrontational device and the executable file as a procedural form, using parody and associative montage to expose how displacement is repeatedly translated into systems that demand coherence from lives structured by uncertainty.

Malaz Usta is a Damascus-born filmmaker, designer and artist based in Amsterdam. Working across moving image, animation, sound, installation and performance, his practice examines displacement, waiting, memory and the instability of belonging. Usta studied Radio, TV and Cinema at Marmara University in Istanbul before completing a Master’s in Artistic Research in and Through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam. His short film A Year in Exile (2020), assembled from daily recordings made over the course of a year, received Best National Short Documentary at the Bosphorus International Film Festival and further recognition at the Istanbul International Film Festival and Encounters. More recent projects extend his diaristic approach through live performance, 3D modeling, altered game environments and game-engine imagery, including space_invaders.exe (2024) and the ongoing research project Poetics of exile: the unfamiliar space of waiting.