Events

The emergency is here!

From 16 July-14 November, 2021 you can join the 23rd Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) – an artist-led response to the complexities of the climate emergency in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region today.

The climate emergency is the greatest threat to our planet. Its dire impact is already being disproportionately felt in the MENA region, an area which has faced unprecedented climatic events in recent years. Scorching temperatures, rising sea levels and dwindling natural resources increasingly threaten a region already confronting the continuing realities of conflict and colonialism.

This year’s festival presents a multidisciplinary range of artist-led responses to the climate emergency. From performance to visual art, the festival provides a platform to express the lived experiences of those often excluded from climate conversations, while addressing interconnected issues such as imperialism, climate justice and capitalism.

Across four months, the LAAF programme will engage, inform, question, and creatively reimagine our collective future direction. It asks: what can we learn from those already stepping up to respond? How can we do more? How do we collectively deal with the challenges that communities are already experiencing?

In response to the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic, the festival will – for the first time – run until November 2021. It will continue LAAF’s mission to celebrate the best in Arab arts and culture, connecting physical audiences in Liverpool with audiences around the world online.

Further information on festival events and participating artists and performers will be released across our social media and website in the coming weeks!

For more information and to sign up to the LAAF newsletter: https://www.arabartsfestival.com/save-the-date-laaf-returns-this-summer/

Film Screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA): 21-23 September

The London Palestine Festival offers an exclusive selection of films, devoting two sessions to Gaza via documentary and experimental short films. Also, the pre-festival programme revisits the definitive documentary on Israel’s chilling control of movement between territories.

Gaza
Gary Keane and Andrew McConnell | 2019 | 90’
TUESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER | 18:30
ICA: THE MALL, ST. JAMES’S, SW1Y 5AH

Infiltrators
Khaled Jarrar | 2012 | 70′
WEDNESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER | 20:45
ICA: THE MALL, ST. JAMES’S, SW1Y 5AH

Gaza: Intimate Screens, a selection of short films
Electrical Gaza | My Gaza Online | Old Child | When Things Occur
THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER | 18:30
ICA: THE MALL, ST. JAMES’S, SW1Y 5AH

For tickets: https://www.palestinefilm.org.uk/

Exhibition Dates: 25 June-26 September, 2021

Private View: 5-8pm, 24 June, 2021

The Mosaic Rooms presents the first UK solo exhibition by Berlin-based art collective Fehras Publishing Practices. ‘Borrowed Faces: Future Recall’ looks at the Cold War and its effect on cultural practices in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa region, which generated one of the most fertile periods in the history of Arab culture and publishing. The exhibition is part of the 2021 Shubbak Festival.

Artists Sami Rustom, Omar Nicolas and Kenan Darwich have been working together as Fehras Publishing Practices since 2015. Their work playfully explores significant cultural moments in the history of Arab publishing through performance, installation and publications, skilfully blending fiction and reality.

‘Borrowed Faces’ unpicks the political and cultural policies of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, investigating the networks and projects funded by the rival superpowers. The exhibition has three distinct sections, presenting different strands of the artists’ current research.

One section exhibits Fehras’ photo-novel ‘Borrowed Faces, no. 1’. Through a series of photographs, the viewer is transported to Beirut in the 1960s by three women, performed by the collective. The novel follows these characters’ journeys as they interact with historical figures and institutions of the Cold War, revealing the complex tangle of power, money, creativity and friendship.

Another section presents the collective’s archives of books, magazines, letters, memoirs and photographs. The installation also presents a part of Fehras’ research that focuses on London based publications during the Cold War era in the 1960s, when the city became a meeting point for Arab intellectuals.

In a newly produced collage work, the final section presents a re-imagining of the archive for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This anti-communist cultural organisation was later discovered to have been funded by the CIA. The protagonists of Borrowed Faces reappear in this work, travelling into the future to interact with this archive. Through it, the artists explore the role of institutional archiving in defining knowledge hierarchies and classifying facts.

This exhibition is delivered in partnership with Delfina Foundation, The Mosaic Rooms and Shubbak Festival, with support from the Goethe-Institut London. The research of Borrowed Faces is facilitated with the support from Berlin Artistic Research Grant for 2020/21.

For more: https://mosaicrooms.org/event/fehras-publishing-practices-borrowed-faces-future-recall/

The Mosaic Rooms presents ‘A Ruined Garden’, a mini-zine by London-based illustrator and printmaker Aleesha Nandhra.

The zine was created in response to the current exhibition by ‘Borrowed Faces: Future Recall’ by Fehras Publishing Practices at The Mosaic Rooms. A Ruined Garden is inspired by a poem of the same title by Sajjad Zaheer originally published by the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association (AAWA) in their journal Lotus in 1970.

Aleesha Nandhra selected this piece of writing from the archive materials on display in the exhibition saying: ‘Out of all of the publications in the archive I was drawn to ‘LOTUS’ (Afro-Asian Writings) as it reflected some of my own personal heritage, and was a subject that I knew so little about at the same time. It’s such a beautiful publication, with narratives, poetry, critiques on art and political movements and people.’

The mini-zine engages with the stories that lie hidden in institutional and individual archives. It interrogates the practice of independent publishing by its method of distribution. Inspired by the anti-colonial legacy of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association’s journal Lotus, the zine seeks to enact solidarity through publishing by making the reader the distributor. The artist invites you to gift the zine to friends and strangers and to leave it to be discovered in unlikely places. Evoking the DIY spirit of zine making and through this act of independent re-distribution this project hopes to disrupt the traditional modes of publishing and distribution practices, returning again to print in the age of e-publishing.

You can download the zine via the Mosaic Rooms website, along with instructions on how to print and fold the zine: https://mosaicrooms.org/event/a-ruined-garden-by-aleesha-nandhra/

Aleesha Nandhra is an illustrator and printmaker from London. Outside of commercial illustration, their work explores narratives and themes such as nature, culture, mental health, and music.

This commission is presented in collaboration with The British Library.