Connecting people through art 

The Han Nefkens Foundation, in collaboration with WIELS, is pleased to present More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water, the latest work by Panos Aprahamian, recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2024.

The project was developed in collaboration with Museu Tàpies, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Jameel Arts Centre, and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina.

Join us for the opening evening on 4 March 2026 at 19:00 for the screening, followed by a conversation with the artist and curator Helena Kritis.

More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water (2025), whose title alludes to a line by Palestinian poet and aid worker Jehan Bseiso, is the final instalment of Panos Aprahamian’s unintended, unofficially titled Karantina Trilogy. The film returns to Beirut’s Karantina, a former quarantine district on the city’s northeastern edge, bordered by the heavily polluted Beirut River. Like the preceding works in the triptych, Odorless Blue Flowers Awake Prematurely and This Haunting Memory That Is Not My Own (both 2021), it probes a site marred by environmental degradation, industrial infrastructures, and uncounted deaths.

The district and the river have witnessed recurring cycles of violence, from Armenian refugees fleeing the Ottoman genocide in the 1910s and 1920s, to the political assassinations of 1958, to the Karantina massacre of 1976, when right-wing Maronite militias slaughtered the camp's predominantly Palestinian residents. Layered upon these histories are waste dumps, slaughterhouses, hate crimes, and the devastation of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, also known as the Beirut blast, an event whose causes remain unelucidated. Together, these layers form a sacrifice zone where the city disposes of its dead.

In the film, the eerie, disembodied voice of a paranormal investigator recounts her passage along the river as a descent into the underworld, evoking toxic debris, spectral echoes, foul odours, and unseen presences. The camera lingers on the river’s ebb and flow, revealing deteriorating ecologies and wavering industrial reflections, while the narration – part investigative report, part diary entry, part speculative fiction – threads fractured histories into a non-linear chronicle. Blending documentary realism, abstraction, and fiction, Aprahamian transforms the river into both a portal to the intangible and a distressed mirror of the present, confronting the sediments of violence, trauma, and environmental ruin.

Panos Aprahamian (b. 1986) is a Berlin-based unfiction filmmaker, media artist, and writer from Beirut's peripheral rustbelt. Through language, image, and ritual, his practice explores the spectral presence of the future past in undead bodies, sacrificial landscapes, and social relations. He studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and the University of the Arts London, graduating with an MA in Documentary Film in 2015. Aprahamian was a Caspian Arts scholar in 2015 and a fellow at Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace Program between 2017 and 2018. He is the winner of the Ecumenical Prize at the 2022 Oberhausen Short Film Festival, recipient of the Eliza Moore fellowship for artistic excellence in 2024, and the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production grantee for the 2024–2026 cycle. Between 2019 and 2021, he taught at the American University of Beirut in the Fine Arts Department and the Media Studies Program.