October 17, 18, 19, 2024
Kaaistudios
Brussels
Day tickets are for sale here.
With Cheb Mimo, Common Ground, Haig Aivazian with Noor Abed, Kid Fourteen, Leila Delicious, Makimakkuk, Mona Benyamin, Nadah El Shazly, New Agents, Samaa Wakim, and more…
“Read the Room” is Mophradat’s biennial festival produced in partnership with Kaaitheater. The festival is an experimental place filled with desires and projections, but the future it presumes is for many today inconceivable as a time and place to come. Nonetheless, by coming together for three distinct evening programs, the festival claims an emotional gathering space – where visual artists, performers, musicians, and writers come together to make work with each other and with audiences, navigating and locating shared memories, feelings, and words.
October 17, 2024
8.00pm Moonscape
Video by Mona Benyamin, 2020
Arabic with English subtitles, 17 mins
Exploring the relationship between hope, nostalgia, and despair, Moonscape is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad performed by a male and female duet. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and founded the Lunar Embassy. The visuals of the film are a mix of scenes of the main characters – played by the artist’s parents – reenacting scenes from the Arab music industry, film noir motifs, material from NASA’s archives, and other found footage.
Mona Benyamin is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work examines intergenerational perspectives on hope, trauma, and identity. Mona works in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, archival material, and time-based media. In consideration of art history’s political potential, she uses humor and irony as tools of resistance and reflection in her art practice. Her work is heavily influenced by television culture, ranging from film noir to contemporary Arab pop music.
8.40pm Listening Along With Cheb Mimo
Music and English spoken, 60 mins
Cheb Mimo takes the audience on a deep dive into some of the lesser-known genres and subgenres of North African music, starting with what is known as the Proto-Rai Underground – music that came out of communities around the port of Oran in Algeria during the 1970s and 1980s. By playing some of the records and cassette tapes he has found in local shops and personal collections, Mimo shares his exploration of the many different and complex twists and turns that music takes from its origins to becoming its modern progeny.
A DJ, selector, and NTS Radio resident, Cheb Mimo has roots in both Algeria and Tunisia and is currently based in London. He is working to uncover and share forgotten musical treasures from North Africa and the Arab world as a way of contributing to preserving and reviving this complex and rich musical heritage.
10pm Nadah El Shazly Sings the Classics
Music, 30 mins
On Mophradat’s invitation, Nadah El Shazly sings some of the classics of the Arab world’s rich pop music vernacular. With her voice, she creates a space for the memories and emotions that bring this community together in their shared joy in music, as well as the intimacy and familiarity that comes with having a common language.
Cairo-born producer and vocalist Nadah El Shazly is a prominent voice in the electronic music underworld of her hometown. As heard on her debut album “Ahwar” (2017), her music radically reinvents Egypt’s popular music while exploring electronic and improvisational idioms. In 2022, Nadah produced her first film score for Fyzal Boulifa’s award-winning feature, The Damned Don’t Cry, and, most recently, she made another for Mahdi Fleifel’s first feature To A Land Unknown. Later this year, she will be releasing her second album, which she will be presenting at this year’s Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht.
October 18, 2024
8pm The New Agents Variety Show
Performance, English spoken, 120 mins
The New Agents Variety Show is a night in four acts: Samaa Wakim delivers “Nauseating Delirium,” a new collectively-written script for and on the occasion of the show, by the New Agents, a segment of burlesque and its antagonisms by Leila Delicious, the culinary and the macabre come together in an experiment by Common Ground, all with the live musical accompaniment and select tracks by Kid Fourteen.
The show is developed in response to Mophradat’s prompt guiding the program: “What Do We Need for the Future?”
Common Ground is a collaborative artistic project started by Anna Celda and Saja Amro. Using the dining table and the kitchen as research laboratories, it aims to create a caring and comforting space to delve into topics like female labor, inherited knowledge, and culinary histories. Their recent work focuses on envisioning liberation in Palestine and globally by designing collective cooking experiences inspired by ancestral sensory rituals, creating mental and physical spaces for imagination and connection.
Khodor Ellaik aka Kid Fourteen is a Lebanese composer, performer and sound artist born in 1987. His practice is at the crossroads between composition, sound research, writing, performance, and the visual identity of the live act.
Leila Delicious is a Palestinian performance and burlesque artist whose work exists at the epicenter of queer Palestinian decadence. She began her career as a political performance artist and sees burlesque as a continuation of that focus. For Leila, performing indulgence and abundance has become a ritual of embodied decolonization.
Samaa Wakim is a Palestinian performer, choreographer, and cultural manager based in Haifa. A graduate of the Acting Department at Haifa University, she has performed in local and international shows. As an artist who grew up in Palestine’s rich music and dance culture, Samaa believes in mixing contemporary tools and multidisciplinary arts to contribute to the global arts, as well as the Palestinian cause and preserving its collective identity.
New Agents is a program set up by Mophradat that brings together a working group of artists and curators to collaborate and learn together over an 18-months period, the 2023-24 participants are Bayan Kiwan, Dani Arbid, Nour El Safoury, Sara Bouzgarrou, and Siwar Kraytem. Bayan Kiwan is an artist based between New York and Amman. Her paintings observe the domestic sphere as a contested site of everyday resistance and intimacy. Dani Arbid is a writer, publisher, and filmmaker based between London and Berlin. They are the founder of Barakunan, a publishing and media enterprise dedicated to elevating underrepresented BAME creatives. Dani’s work explores the fabrication of new myths through the subversion of genre and format, driven by an instinct toward social and political commentary. Nour El Safoury is an editor and an independent publisher who in 2020 founded the Cairo-based publishing outfit Esmat Publishing List, which she presently runs. Esmat publishes and circulates texts by authors who bridge the arts with other disciplines to open up fresh ways to feel and imagine. She also co-organizes the Cairo Art Book Fair. Sara Bouzgarrou is a Tunisian artist, researcher, Risograph printer, and art coordinator. She is interested in the intersection between print, food-studies, and feminist issues through her interdisciplinary approach. Siwar Krai(y)tem is a multilingual designer, researcher, and artist based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her research and artistic practice focus on multilingualism and language in times of transformation, as well as the construction of society through language.
Production coordination by Felipe Steinberg
Production management by Niamh Moroney
Commissioned and produced by Mophradat as part of the New Agents program and presented in collaboration with Kaaitheater
“Nauseating Delirium” is written by Bayan Kiwan, Dani Arbid, and Nour El Safoury
Dramaturgy by Carolina Mendonça
October 19, 2024
7.30pm What’s All This Dramaturgy About?
Publication launch, English, 30 mins
A drink and launch of Mophradat’s latest booklet from the series Read the Room that looks at the different scopes of dramaturgy within choreographic practice, in the presence of some of the contributors.
8.30pm Nothing Will Remain… Other Than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of This World
Performance by Haig Aivazian with Noor Abed
English and Arabic spoken, 35 mins
“Don’t be Sad. No one will manage to get rid of us. Palestine is a fish bone lodged in the world’s throat. No one will manage to swallow it. Don’t worry.” From Wadih Sanbar’s last words to his son, Palestinian historian and poet Elias Sanbar.
In a collaboration commissioned by Mophradat for Read the Room Festival, Haig Aivazian and Noor Abed guide the audience in a collective sonic experiment. Sifting through recorded poems, songs, and recitations, the pair have composed a medley made up of guttural sounds, hums, hisses, sighs, whistles, whispers, mumbles, gasps, coughs…Through a loose choreography mirroring the porosity of sound transmission, they will ask the audience to activate mouths and larynxes, in a call and response exercise that will have them listening ‘in the moment’ to the very resonance they generate. This will be an attempt to create a space of collective synchrony and action, a moment in constant formation where the room is traveled and transformed by vibration, where the audience becomes a choir and their bodies a resonance chamber.
Haig Aivazian is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a range of media and modes of address, he delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects, and moves people, objects, animals, landscape, and architecture.
Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist who works at the intersection of performance and film. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’.
9.30pm Makimakkuk Live
Concert, 45 mins
Experience a unique live performance blending genres such as Palestinian folk, experimental, hip-hop, electronic, and ambient. The artist’s concept of Sovereign Hop/SoveRap/Rapsiyade—a term they coined—reflects their creative freedom and commitment to self-determination. This revolutionary subgenre integrates diverse influences and rhythms to assert indigenous sovereignty and resist the effects of colonialism and cultural homogenization. Through original compositions, live rapping, singing, spoken word, and DJing, the performance explores themes of self-expression, justice, and mental health, challenging conventional genre boundaries and celebrating cultural identity.
Based in Ramallah, Makimakkuk is a Palestinian music producer, performing artist, MC, and selector: A music blender.
Read the Room
Curated by Mophradat (Mai Abu ElDahab with Krystel Khoury)
Production Coordinator Felipe Steinberg
Production Manager Niamh Moroney
Administration Nicky Tsianti
Co-produced by Kaaitheater and Mophradat
All proceeds from ticket sales will be used towards Mophradat’s “Living Stipends for Palestine” initiative.