“I imagine all this before I go to sleep: my grandmother, who lived in Tarshiha, Palestine, is living in Montréal, in the same city as me. A nightly ritual of dream, fantasy and prayer: talking to ghosts becomes an act of remembering or of returning, an act of resurgence, in how we get to tell our stories, how we get to re-imagine our histories, one that disappeared in migration, now belongs to me and my dreams. I don’t know anything about this grandmother who lived in Palestine. I only ever met her once. Imagining her as I need her to be in the story anchors me, grounds me in a deep state of ‘be/longing.’ It’s an intimate act of prayer, a ghostly intervention in time, reckoning with my inability to write against grief.”
For the Session 16, Nasrin Himada proposes a reading-performance on memory and the imagined futures that it generates. She will accompany her presentation with the video work Incidental Insurgents by artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal), in Kanien'kehá:ka territory. Her practice and research explores the politics of contemporary art practice, specifically focusing on experimental and expanded cinema, and contemporary media arts. Her most recent curatorial work has been exhibited at Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and DHC/ART: Foundation for Contemporary Art. Her writings have been published in C Magazine, Critical Signals, The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Fuse Magazine, MICE Magazine, among others.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s multidisciplinary practice — sound, image, text, installation and performance — probes a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is increasingly shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. Their work questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary can emerge. The duo lives and works between New York and Ramallah and regularly participates in solo and group exhibitions around the world.