This programme probes the political and philosophical nature of the night sky, featuring new non-fiction work by artists from Morocco and Afghanistan.

In Fragments From Heaven, meteorite showers descending upon the Moroccan Sahara create communion between the desert and cosmos, while providing a lifeline for the region’s inhabitants. For some, these splintered comets help elucidate an inquiry into the origins of life, for others, they promise a more urgent and material means of sustenance, in the context of a radically changing labour market disturbing traditional nomadic lifestyles. For both groups, this astrological activity presents a meandering and high-stakes quest in a landscape so often portrayed as void.

Takbir explores the sonic memory of Afghanistan’s capital city Kabul and its various foreign occupations, filmed on the night that the Taliban took power in 2021. Shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ ring out and obscuring its orators, Hazara’s camera follows its reverberations throughout a dizzying, fluorescent sky, at the turn of a new day and a new political regime.