Photo by Senna Ahmad.
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What is a Palestinian performance in this moment of genocide, catastrophe, the world clinging to its fundamental qualities as we are annihilated? What does it do? Who does it reach? Who, sorrowfully, closes their eyes and ears and heart to its hatred, its grief, its stubborn insistence on survival? How does it circulate, make anything possible, get eaten and metabolized by the vultures of a counterrevolutionary art world? Why do we do it?
These are questions with no answers, questions which instead we devote the entirety of our lives to asking. Towards those questions, this event gathers Palestinian performance artists across medium, genre, place, and practice for an afternoon and evening of performance, research, and performance-research. Curated by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, featuring work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mette Loulou von Kohl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Muyassar Yousef Kurdi.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027). Find more at fargotbakhi.com.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (virtuality, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.
Born from the orange at the center before the new world came, Mette Loulou von Kohl is a performer, organizer, and cultural worker. They are a queer femme of Palestinian, Lebanese and Danish descent, raised across and in-between borders. Mette Loulou uses their art to challenge the settler-colonization of Palestine and in service of Palestinian self-determination and liberation. They locate the power to disrupt violent systems in multiplicity and therefore take an intentional multimedia approach to art-making. They found their first community as a socially-engaged artist through the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ EmergeNYC and have received support as a Jerome Foundation AIRspace Resident, MacDowell Colony Fellow, Zoukak Theater Resident Artist, and as a grant recipient from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. They have shared work across North America and Europe. They exist in two places at once.
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Women's Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces of voice & movement inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her forthcoming LP will be released in the Fall of 2025 with Bilna’es.