Wednesday 13 November 2024, 7.30pm
Alfie White has produced a series of moving images blending into one another from footage that Alfie collected using a digital handicam that they've had as a companion for the past six years. The film is non-narrative and absurd, juxtaposing images from real life with what can be read as a sometimes leisurely and sometimes itching purgatory. Bint Mbareh provides a live score for this film. The idea to show this film (for the first time), originated in a conversation that Bint and Alfie were having about the complexities of seeing and witnessing, which have been very prominent in discourse around the genocide of Gaza for the past year and making manifestos around how to avoid saturation. The film offers a very long term portal into someone's life, thereby challenging with its longevity the abandonment that Palestinians fear takes place with the saturation of media with images of their suffering.
Additionally, Bint Mbareh will facilitate a shared vocalising and choir workshop using poetry she has written which challenges the possibility of performing, the possibility of being known as a singular voice, and implicates the entire audience, invoking a lack of ownership of the voices we transmit into the work, or at least challenging the obsession with the possession of the voice, and practising using our voices together.
Finally, we will watch a film called They Do Not Exist, documenting Palestinian life in Lebanon in the early 70s. The film was released in 1974 and was directed by Mustafa Abu Ali, in the aftermath of the Tel alZaatar Massacre which Israel inflicted on Palestinians in Lebanon. The film documents the joys, tribulations, traditions and invisible spaces of everyday life mostly in the south of Lebanon.
Regular Working Group: A group for concerned listeners; this time, the group listens for answers to the question of how to look, how to confront the guilt of witnessing, everyday, while not a hair on our bodies is touched by the massacres we are seeing; and possibly, how to find alternative portals to seeing and hearing.
Bint Mbareh is a Palestinian sound artist with a focus on how to unimagine borders using water bodies and their relevant communities, with recent performances at Tate Modern, Morphin Raum, Unsound Festival, and Troxy.
Alfie White is an artist born and based in South London. Working from a personal and abstract space of experience and observation, Alfie uses photography, writing, and film to explore the intricacies of the human condition, with a particular focus on its fringe.
