Photo by Senna Ahmad.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 4:30PM. We will do our best to get everyone in comfortably!
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.
PROGRAM
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us | فقط أصوات ترتعش في أجسادنا
Only sounds that tremble through us is part of the ongoing project from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. This evolving work has taken on multiple forms that intersect and overlap; an online project (mayamnesia.com), installations and a series of public performances.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi: TERROR COUNTER
A debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages–interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical–constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians, TERROR COUNTER moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, attempting to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life.
Featuring performance support by Ethan Philbrick.
Mette Loulou von Kohl: There are no words, so may it be the end
A satirical commentary on the “counter-terror” industry of Zionist state. The performance interrogates how the success of the industry is dependent on the constructed identity of the Zionist State as existing in a perpetual state of defense and moral exception. There are no words, so may it be the end is a multivocal, multimedia solo performance proposing Palestinian refusal to be seen and unseen as weapons in challenging and destabilizing settler colonial projects and identities.
Muyassar Kurdi: “Body Poetics: Falling”
“Body Poetics: Falling” is an interdisciplinary performance that weaves together sound, image, and ritual. Through meditative movement and immersive sound, it explores loss, transformation, and the body’s relationship to time and space. The performance flows between the ancient and the futuristic, where sound and image meet in a visceral, embodied moment. It invites the audience to experience the body as both anchor and release, dissolving boundaries between movement and stillness, memory and future.
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.