BEIRUT: In her mock Western “Bethlehem Bandolero” (2005), Larissa Sansour dons a red sombrero and a pair of toy 45-caliber pistols and yanks a handkerchief up over her nose, like an old-fashioned bank robber.

For the next five minutes or so, the London-based Palestinian artist strides through Bethlehem to the accompaniment of a “Pulp Fiction” – style California-surfer soundtrack. Her destination is an O.K. Corral-style showdown with her nemesis: the Israeli separation wall.

Sansour’s 2006 piece “Happy Days” also takes its cue from the narrative tropes of Western pop culture. Here, the theme music of the long-running ’70s-’80s U.S. sitcom provides the carefree accompaniment to tourist shots of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, featuring picturesque buildings, frat-boy Israeli soldiers, and rustic locals.

A pig-tailed Sansour (billed “The Palestinian”) appears in various states of blissful relaxation – lolling on a child’s swing set, and playing the oud. The biting irony of the piece rests upon how at odds this tourist-brochure Israeli army (“as ‘itself’”) is with the force occupying Palestinian land.

“Bethlehem Bandolero” and “Happy Days” are among the seven works by Sansour being projected during CologneOFF, a four-day-long screening cycle of video art commencing at the Dawar al-SHAMS Wednesday.

The oeuvre of the 30-something Sansour mingles aesthetic and political concerns with a sly sense of humor.

Her work oscillates from playful-looking works like “Bethlehem Bandolero” and “Happy Days,” which make use of mainstream pop culture forms to open-up the spectator’s mind to Palestinian realities, to the more conventional-looking, yet moving, work that documents her family’s contest with the occupation regime surrounding Bethlehem.

Sansour’s best-known work falls into this second category. Her 2006 video “Mloukhieh (Soup over Bethlehem)” (9’30”) opens on the rooftop of the Sansour home in Bethlehem, where the family’s gathered for meal of mloukhieh.

Named after the green plant that is its main ingredient, it’s served as soup, usually with meat(s), rice, lemon juice (or onions in vinegar) and dried bread. Variations on mloukhieh are consumed all over the Levant and Egypt but, as Sansour suggests here, the dish is one component of a multi-faceted Palestinian identity that has been fragmented but not destroyed by Israeli occupation.

As the meal proceeds, a hand-held camera captures the action in black-and-white – the only colors being the yellow of the bowl of sliced lemons and the deep olive-green of the mloukhieh itself. The camera listens in on the Sansour’s apparently casual dinnertime chatter – moving from the putative origins of mloukhieh and its effectiveness as an aphrodisiac to the challenges the host (the filmmaker’s brother Maxim Sansour) faced in trying to find fresh leaves.

The best mloukhieh comes from Jericho, he reminds his family and, with the Israeli-imposed travel restrictions Palestinians face, goods don’t pass freely from there to Bethlehem anymore. He jokes that, in Bethlehem these days, laying hands on mloukhieh is akin to trying to score hash in another country – you have to have a reliable source and be discrete in your inquiries, least the authorities crack down on the contraband.

“Do the Israelis eat mloukhieh?” one of the Sansours asks.

“I don’t think so,” another responds.

“Ah, so it’s still a Palestinian dish, then. They haven’t claimed that as their own, like hummus.”

Sansour relishes political engagement as much as other artists are leery of it. The relationship between politics and art in the Middle East, she remarked in an earlier interview, “is born out of a heavily charged local climate, in which any kind of reduction of art to, say, a strictly formal activity would be ridiculous. The high frequency of political art also [makes] art a necessary vehicle for political exchange in a region perhaps lacking the ordinary platforms for such an exchange.”

Paraphrasing Jean-Luc Godard’s remark that Palestinians are doomed to be the subject of documentary, Sansour said that it “is vital for me to break away from the obligation to document the political and social misery of my country at its most outspoken levels. This kind of documentation is what people already associate with Palestine.

“If the agenda is to propagate a new, challenging and more diverse image of Palestine, then remaining loyal in imagery only to those in most dire despair will not do the trick. Palestinians are currently the subjects of tragic documentary. The world has grown accustomed to this. I find it very important to change this.”

Video art, and new media art, has a reputation for being hip. In keeping with this cool, new media artists and those who promote their work have been innovative in using different platforms to disseminate the work.

CologneOFF is a case in point. Launched in 2006 as an online film festival with no fixed address, it was founded, and is directed, by one Agricola de Cologne. It’s CologneOFF’s conceit that “Agricola de Cologne” isn’t an actual human being but a “virtual artist and curator,” and it seems was branded as such in January 2000.

De Cologne has been credited with creating a “global Internet-based network, consisting of countless projects and platforms focusing on different forms of digital art online, and more than 2000 media artists and numerous curators, institutions and organizations around the globe.”

This network is also credited with developing CologneOFF’s off-line existence – making its programs available for screening at various international festivals and exhibition spaces. It was evidently in response to its increasing corporality that, since 2010, the event has been dubbed the Cologne International Video Art Festival.

CologneOFF began its 2011 amblings in January during the International Film Festival Rotterdam and it docks at Dawar al-SHAMS just two stops shy of the end of its tour, at Riga’s Waterpieces Festival.

There is lots of video art in store over these four days, retailed out into several screening schedules, projected for two hours a day, and video installations (changing daily), which presumably will run in loops over the course of the day.

Sansour is one of two solo artists. Most of the screening and installation playlists have been programmed in geographical and thematic terms.

Sansour’s solo program has been placed alongside “Messages from behind the Wall,” which provides a rare opportunity to see the work of artists from Gaza – in this case five pieces, by Ayman Asraq, Mohammed Harb, Shareef Sarhan, Majed Shala and Basel al-Maqusi.

For those with a special interest in the video art of greater Middle East, there are several curated programs dedicated to artists from this region.

The installation “Behind Words,” curated by Abir Boukhari, is comprised of ten works by Syrian artists – Adnan Jatto, Fadi Hamwi, Hazem Hamwi, Hiba Aizouk, Giwan Khalaf, Maha Shahine, Nisrine Boukhari, Razan Mohsen, Raed Zeino and Ruba Khweis.

Another installation is comprised of two components “The Caucasians” – a nine-piece solo show by Georgian artist Irina Gabiani – and “Video Art from Armenia,” a nine-artist program curated by Vahram Akimian.

“Close to My Heart” is a selection of video art from Iran. Curated by Iranian-American artist Alysse Stepanian, it features works by Morehshin Allahyari, Maneli Aygani, Neda Darzi, Samira Eskandarfar, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Laleh Mehran, Payam Mofidi, Hamed Shahihi and Parya Vatankhah.

For those uninterested in this region’s video art output, there are 16 additional thematically and geographically curated screening programs and installations, which promise work from as far afield as the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.

“CologneOFF 2011” can be found at Dawar al-SHAMS (aka The Sunflower Art Center), Tayouneh, from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3. Screenings are 8-10 p.m. daily. Tickets are LL5,000 for one session, LL10,000 for all four sessions. For more information on CologneOFF in Beirut, see: coff.newmediafest.org and www.shamslb.org.