Tag: climate crisis

October 31, 2021

22 – Tanya Shamil: Through a Looking Glass / Evil, I

Illustration: Tanya Shamil

“What if the species and civilisations on other planets have established contact with one another, but refrained from reaching out to Earth because they consider us to be the least evolved planet in the galaxy?”

A duo of digital illustrations questioning our societally-imposed values and accepted attitudes towards consumption.

Tanya Shamil is a 19 year-old artist, also known as The Gluten Club. She started her career in the arts by creating and launching an app called “arabemoji” at the age of 13. Growing up, Tanya would spend hours glued to her comics. admiring their beauty as an entertaining outlet while also appreciating their impact youngsters. A year later she began creating and posting pop art that dealt with social issues. Her work carries influences from artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Banksy. Tanya has been named one of the “7 Omani Artists on the Rise” by Oman Magazine, as well as one of the “9 Contemporary Artists who should be on your Cultural Radar” by the National News for her visual arts. She lives in Muscat.

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October 31, 2021

22 – Nooriyah: Lo-Fi Sounds & Soundscapes

A playlist made up of relaxing MENA beats, sounds and natural soundscapes with the intention of prompting the listener to appreciate their surroundings and recognise the disproportionate climate impacts on the MENA region. Filled with Arab, Turkish and North African sounds, this is an ode to our environment <3

London-based international DJ, Nooriyah, is on a mission to make the influence of Arabic music known globally. Renowned for her unique blends of Arabic genres, grooves, and ground-shaking drum rhythms, she is one of very few selectors pushing a 100% Arabic sound on the UK airwaves with residencies on Foundation FM and Plus 1 Radio. Her intentional body of work encompasses music, literature, podcasts, and film grounded in a strong desire to highlight and uplift marginalised voices from across the Arab world and diaspora. From taking over the New Radicalism Festival stage in Rotterdam to playing New York’s Yalla party to headlining Dubai’s Femme Fest and London’s Shubbak Festival, Nooriyah’s stage presence is guaranteed to bring the energy that draws in crowds internationally. Some notable features include Vice Arabia, Scenenoise, Mille World and Renk Magazin.

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October 29, 2021

22 – K. Eltinaé: daughterland

Photo: Mario Pardo Segovia

K. Eltinaé is a Sudanese poet of Nubian descent, raised internationally as a third culture kid. His work has been translated into Arabic, Greek, Farsi, and Spanish and has appeared in World Literature Today, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Many Muslim Worlds (Penguin), The African American Review, Muftah, among others. He is the winner of The 2019 Beverly Prize for International Literature (Eyewear Publishing) and Muftah´s Creative Writing Competition At Home in the World and the recipient of the Visionary Arts Memorial Reza Abdoh Poetry Prize 2021, He is also co-winner of the 2019 Dignity Not Detention Prize (Poetry International). He currently resides in Granada, Spain. His debut collection The Moral Judgement of Butterflies is forthcoming this spring from Black Spring Press. More of his work can be found at: https://www.instagram.com/k.eltinae.

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October 29, 2021

22 – Nour Sokhon: Volatile Grounds

“Volatile Grounds” is an auditory installation which is part of a performative installation entitled The Great Report, which took place in Kampnagel, Hamburg (2020).

“Volatile Grounds” embodies the privatisation of lands and the mismanagement of waste. The incessant neglect in which our hand in nature and lack of respect towards the environment caused this situation to escalate, and is one that requires our urgent attention. We have already reached a critical point where the repercussions of our actions have led to mass suffering, such as high levels of food and water contamination, medical setbacks, and further detrimental effects towards the people. We cannot continue with this downward spiral lest it leads to the further demise of the entire country and its citizens.

“…we hear from time to time that someone got into the hospital and was cured getting out he contracted a virus so this virus contracted is due to the storage of the psychotoxic that’s in the hospitals and there are some apartments within Beirut where are stored these kind of psychotoxics” — Anonymous

The soundscape is composed of interview material collected in 2019 from anonymous activists a few months before the start of the revolution in Beirut, Lebanon. The content centres around the waste management crisis and land reclamation issue present in the region. The raw and manipulated field recordings work as metaphors to convey the constant disharmony present in the country. For instance, crow sounds are used to represent death and the abyss. On the other hand car horns describe the sonic environment of the country and that change needs to happen in order for it to stand back on its feet. The sonic score maintains a high level of density throughout most of the composition, similar to how the country’s citizens have been honking at the politicians for years. Coincidently during the early production phase of the project in October 2019 the revolution broke out in the country, which unveiled concealed truths that these anonymous activists had shared in the interviews.

We give thanks to all the anonymous activists that have contributed their time to “Volatile Grounds” and The Great Report.

Photo: Omar Sfeir

Nour Sokhon is a Lebanese interdisciplinary artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her creative practice is centered around exploring different methods of working with artistic research including interview material, field recordings and recorded material from an organized site specific intervention. The research is then translated into sound/music compositions, performances, interactive installations and moving image work.

In 2014, Nour achieved an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the American University in Dubai, and in 2017 she culminated a large scale project; a documentary entitled ‘People on Sound’, as part of her Master’s degree in Sound for the Moving Image at the Glasgow School of Art in the UK.

In 2019, Nour received the Emerging Artist Prize at the Sursock Museum in Lebanon, for a moving image piece entitled ‘Revisiting: Hold Your Breath’. She is currently completing the Sound Art 2020 scholarship that she was awarded by Lower Saxony and the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, Germany. Nour has exhibited her artwork in Beirut, Dubai, London, Glasgow, Paris, Hamburg, Madrid, Zurich, Juterbog, Sellasia and Beirut. She has also performed in Frankfurt, Berlin, Beirut, Dubai, Paris, Montreal, Melbourne, Sellasia, Bern, Soustons and in different festivals such as the Al Quoz Arts Festival (Dubai, UAE), the Other Worlds Festival (Blackpool, UK), the Network Music Festival 2020 (online) and This Is Not Lebanon (Frankfurt, Germany). She is a member of two sound collectives, Tse Tse Fly Middle East and Heya.

Credits:

Interview Material: Moritz Frischkorn & Nour Sokhon

“Volatile Grounds” (Sound installation): Nour Sokhon

Artistic Director: Moritz Frischkorn

Photographer: Robin Hinsch

Live Performance/ Co-creation: Maria F. Scarano / Scenography: Vladimir Miller / Sound/Music: Katharina Pelosi / Dramaturgy: Heiki Bröckerhoff / “Logistics of Paradise (Video, Text, Installation): Paula Hildebrandt / “Wahala” (Photography, installation): Robin Hinsch / Video: Bianca Peruzzi / Light: Rucarda Schnoor / Production Management: Annalena Kirchler / Cooperation Research: Lucie Schröder / Video editing “Logistics of Paradise”: Anna Fiedler / Participation stage design: LU’UM

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October 29, 2021

22 – Intissar Belaid: Gabès / قابس

Palm trees steadfastly standing

In the face of a poisoned sky

And a sea sometimes dying and sometimes resisting

A train, loaded with pesticides, overtakes pedestrians

Some of whom curse the train,

Others have no choice but to bow their heads

And curse later

A journey – captured in one take – that goes back along part of the phosphate road to the city of Gabès, located in the southeast of Tunisia. Gabès is unique in that it is both an oasis and a seaport overlooking the Mediterranean.

Since its establishment in the 1970s, the chemical complex has caused environmental damage to the city of Gabès, where phosphate is processed for export to Europe. Every day the complex pours tonnes of its toxic waste into the sea by the city’s bay.

Intissar Belaid is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Tunisia. She explores different techniques in the fields of cinema and arts. Her work revolves around tackling concepts like perception and time, human and nonhuman history, as well as collective and individual memory, through an artistic approach that adopts divergent points of view.

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Intissar investigates a variety of disciplines in order to question a generation in relation to its memory in a current socio-political context. Through this questioning, she traces what remains of an event, an era, a history.

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October 29, 2021

22 – Juliana Yazbeck: Ana El Mukhalless (I Am The Saviour)

It feels crucial now to reach out and remind us that we are all we need. Our salvation lies within us: within our systems, our cultures, our indigenous ways of life. We are told that we must exist within systems created to destroy us; that we need these systems to survive. This is a lie. Now, how will you act upon what you know?

Photo: Samuel Black

Juliana Yazbeck is an award-winning actor, writer & musical artist. As an actor, she is best known for her roles as Niqabi Ninja in Sara Sharaawi’s play Niqabi Ninja, Roza Salih in Glasgow Girls (National Theatre of Scotland) and Yara in the Emmy-winning series Shankaboot (BBC World Service).

Juliana’s debut record SUNGOD was awarded PRS Foundation’s Women Make Music Award. Juliana recently played a sold-out show at London’s Electric Ballroom (2020). In 2019, Juliana played London’s ULU alongside Sudanese icon AlSarah, headlined the National Theatre River Stage and Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, and was nominated for the Arab British Centre’s Award for Culture.

Juliana also writes regularly. Her words feature in gal-dem magazine and on Medium.com.

Twitter: @julianayaz

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May 10, 2021

Save the date! LAAF returns this summer

The emergency is here.

Join us from 16 July – 14 November 2021 for the 23rd Liverpool Arab Arts Festival – 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, our programme will engage, inform, question, and creatively reimagine our 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!