Egypt’s 2011 Internet Shutdown: Digital Dissent and the Future of Public Memory
Book Launch | Praneet Soi: Anamorphosis
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Visual Presentation | Undoing Fascism(s) Database
MOK Tuesday% Facebook
🚨We're OPEN! 🚨
Don't miss out on our current exhibition, Homeland Under My Nails by Mohammad Omar Khalil, curated by Abed Al Kadiri.
Please visit our website to learn more about how we are ensuring a safe yet wonderful experience at The Mosaic Rooms.
Please also keep an eye out on our socials for a continuation of our online programme — Future Threads. 🤖
Jordan Nasser, Facebook
Let's tatreez! Show us your stitching progress and join artist Jordan Nassar this Thursday, 16 July, 6pm (BST) for a visit in his studio in New York and to hear more about his work in this conversation with curator Rachel Dedman.
Follow the link to register and receive instructions to join the conversation ➡️ https://bit.ly/Nassarzoom 🧵
New York based mixed media artist of Palestinian descent Jordan Nassar embroiders landscape compositions, which are framed by and built up through repeating patterns adapted from traditional Palestinian motifs. His work imagines an idyllic space: the sort of utopian vision of Palestine held by the displaced constituents that comprise the region’s diaspora.
#letstatreez #traditionalpalestinianembroidery #tatreez #jordannassar #themosaicrooms #tatreezinart #palestinianembroidery #embroidery
Mariam Ghani, Disease, Facebook
Dis-Ease (2018-) is a creative documentary and an archival essay looking at how the metaphors we use to describe illnesses (and how some diseases become metaphors to describe other phenomena) affect how we treat people who are sick, determine whether and when we connect public health to climate change and urban planning, and lock us into militarized national security paradigms for both responding to current epidemic diseases and planning for future pandemics. It was inspired by a residency in the Wellcome Collection in 2018 and the Contagious Cities project in New York in 2019.
Watch the online premiere of the installation view today on our website ➡️ https://bit.ly/mariamghanifilms
Stills courtesy of Mariam Ghani 📷
Mariam Ghani, what we left unfinished, facebook
Don't miss this weekend's (11-12 July) London premiere of 'What We Left Unfinished' by Mariam Ghani.
(follow the instructions via this link ➡️ https://bit.ly/mariamghanifilms and enter the code 'Mosaic' to watch for free. Due to distribution rights, the free streaming is limited to an UK audience.)
What We Left Unfinished (2019) explores the unfulfilled potential of left political futures in Afghanistan. The film is based on archival research assembling five unfinished Afghan feature films shot, but never edited, between 1978 and 1992. These years encompass a troubled history: the Afghan Communist coup d’état, attempted reforms that met bitter rural resistance, a series of internal purges and assassinations, the Soviet invasion and withdrawal, a five-year attempt at national reconciliation, the handover of power to a mujahidin coalition, and finally dissolution into civil war. The film explores the states important fictions: its desires and fears, ambitions and ghosts. In the imaginary presented by most finished films of the period, we see the ideal People’s Democratic Republic that could have been, but wasn’t; in the unfinished films, the reality – a utopian project secured by violent force – lingers like a shadow, just barely concealed behind allegories and codes.
Image: Poster of What We Left Unfinished by @monmoshtari. Courtesy of Mariam Ghani.
Living Room Session | Hello Psychaleppo
Hello Psychaleppoʼs first album “Gool Lʼah” released in 2013 pioneered the music genre of Electro-Tarab. The album was the first of its kind, combining Arabic music theory and rhythms with electronic music tools and sounds creating a harmonious blend that is Electro-Tarab.
Don't miss our Living Room Session with Hello Psychaleppo هالو سايكلپو this Thursday (25 June, 7pm BST, Facebook Livestream) in partnership with @MARSM UK.
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🚨Announcement 🚨
The Mosaic Rooms is excited to announce Future Threads – our new digital programme featuring artists, curators and thinkers from the Arab world and beyond who engage with social transformations and future concepts.
If it is an artist’s duty to reflect the times, what does that reflection look like in this moment of global crisis? Over the next three months Future Threads will unpack the disruptive potential of art and culture and profile some of the most innovative and original responses by artists during this time of pandemic. Check out our new homepage to find out more http://www.mosaicrooms.org
Mohammad Omar Khalil
Artist Mohammad Omar Khalil talks about his journey into printmaking, the development of his work in the context of the places he has called home throughout the years, and his intimate and unwavering relationship with his homeland, Sudan.
Our current exhibition Homeland Under My Nails is a celebration of Khalil's work, and presents a series of selected prints from the artist from throughout his prolific career.
The exhibition opens with a series of self-portraits and early works. Khalil, now 83, has long experimented with self-portraits as a means of self-transformation. One of his earliest self-portraits from 1968, at only 2cm by 2cm, challenges the form and medium. Much of the artist’s early work was destroyed in the flood that hit Sudan’s capital in 1988. The few works that survived are displayed here alongside early experimentations from the artist’s time studying at the Academy of Florence, showing the evolution of his style.
The exhibition then looks at the international sensibility of the artist, who trained in Sudan and Italy, and has lived and worked between New York (USA) and Asilah (Morocco) since the 1970s. Moving to New York he quickly began incorporating pop culture into his work—stamps, music and film. The Harlem Portfolio brings together the life and spirit of the New York neighbourhood in a large scale series of prints 5 metres in length. In 1978, Khalil took part in the first Asilah Festival and continued to return as the festival’s head of studios for three decades. Works including Asilah Connection (1992) show him exploring the materiality of light in the coastal town.
The exhibition will be running until April 26th 2020.
Hassan Musa: Blood is Thicker than Water
Blood is Thicker than Water is Hassan Musa's artistic homage to the peaceful Sudanese revolution in 2019. The performance was inspired by Musa’s questioning of the role of art to change society against an oil-driven geopolitical background.
Hassan Musa (born 1951) is one of the most active contemporary artists with roots in Sudan. Known for his playful calligraphy based paperworks, his paintings reflect on current global political and social issues as well as literature and often reframe the iconography of European art history.
📌🗓 Join us at The Mosaic Rooms this evening for Labour of Love, a talk by Rachel Dedman.🧶
Dedman traces Palestinian embroidery’s shift from a historic, individual practice, associated with self-expression, to a cultural artefact and marker of nationalism.
In this talk, Dedman uses clothing to unfold an intimate, political history of Palestine. Going beyond the embroidered thobe itself, she will explore the circulation of embroidery as image in the 1970s, its operation as a tool of resistance during the First Intifada, the implications of its commodification and the nature of its production today.
For more info ➡️ https://mosaicrooms.org/event/labour-of-love/
🛎Last week to see our exhibition at The Mosaic Rooms!🛎
Anamorphosis: Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley, the first solo exhibition in the UK by the Amsterdam based Indian artist.
The Mosaic Rooms commissioned Soi to create a new body of work comprising paintings and drawings and a video work informed by his recent stays in Palestine.
Anamorphosis also shows works from the artist’s immersions in the workshop of a master craftsman in Kashmir, in an installation bringing together a series of hand painted papier-mâché tiles produced there.
https://mosaicrooms.org/event/praneet-soi/
📣 📚10% in-store discount on all books until 7th December. Come and discover treasures of our bookshop at The Mosaic Rooms.🥁
Join us at The Mosaic Rooms for Labour of Love, a free talk on 5 December at 7PM, as Rachel Dedman traces Palestinian embroidery’s shift from a historic, individual practice, associated with self-expression, to a cultural artefact and marker of nationalism.
In this talk, Dedman uses clothing to unfold an intimate, political history of Palestine. Going beyond the embroidered thobe itself, she will explore the circulation of embroidery as image in the 1970s, its operation as a tool of resistance during the First Intifada, the implications of its commodification and the nature of its production today.
Find out more and register → http://bit.ly/RachelDedman
Yalla Yasmeen!
To mark Frieze Art Fair - London 2019, see Anamorphosis, the first solo exhibition in London and the UK by the Amsterdam based Indian artist Praneet Soi.
This is an extract from Yalla Yasmeen!, the opening work our new exhibition by artist Praneet Soi.
The film combines footage shot by Soi on trips to Palestine this year. Using a cut and paste aesthetic Soi combines film, stills, drawings and notes, and unfolds over 7 chapters.
In this extract he reflects on how a visit to Jenin evokes memories of the news from the camp which hit international headlines in 2002 (when Israeli Defence Force launched an offensive on the camp during the second intifada).
The Mosaic Rooms commissioned Soi to create this new body of work comprising paintings and drawings and a video work informed by his recent stays in Palestine. Anamorphosis also shows recent work based on the artist’s immersions in the workshop of a master craftsman in Kashmir, an installation of hand painted papier-mâché tiles with imagery which combines traditional motifs and archive images, often drawn from media coverage of the region.
On view until 7 December 2019. Open Tue–Sat, 11 AM–6 PM.
Find out more → www.mosaicrooms.org
Video: Extract from Praneet Soi, Yalla Yasmeen!, 2019.
Tales of the Mother Tongue
The Amazigh female warriors are remembered only through Morocco’s oral histories and myths.
Join us on Thursday 25 July 2019 as artist Estabrak Al-Ansari revives their tales in a performance incorporating live painting and film.
RSVP → www.bit.ly/Estabrak
Soundtrack by VIV Records.
Next Tuesday, our final event of this season's programme will be closed by Hamed Yousefi and Sami Khatib.
A filmmaker and art historian, Yousefi will discuss his documentary "The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmed Fardid" which tells the compelling story of this flamboyant figure who became the self appointed spokesperson of the Islamic republic.
Not to be missed → Conversation | Legacies of an Anti-Western Revolution
Nature Morte
Join us this evening for a free screening of Mamali Shafahi's film Nature Morte, in which he ushers his parents into his own queer world where they are reborn as new characters in a universe far away from their peaceful retirement in the suburbs of Tehran.
Following the screening, the filmmaker will be in conversation with artist and writer Ashkan Sepahvand.
RSVP → Film Screening | Nature Morte
TONIGHT | Join curator Azar Mahmoudian and our team for the opening of When Legacies Become Debt this evening from 6:30 – 8:30 PM.
RSVP → www.bit.ly/PreviewLegacies
Images: © Hannah Darabi