Performative Screenings #90

Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian
Nothing Will Remain other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World

“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.

Haig Aivazian and Noor Abed enact a score composed of sound, text, and movement. Through a series of guttural sounds, gasps, coughs, hums, hisses the pair organise the central themes of the text through various parts of their noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae and lungs, each organ embodying and introducing a series of affective and textual registers.

In an ongoing correspondence, the pair continues to exchange reflections, quotidian anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs and recitations. The performance acts as an active labour of selecting, remembering, re-enacting, restructuring, reassessing, and reassembling elements from the correspondence, as a way to grapple with a heightened historical moment characterised by a peak in the constant hum of genocidal violence that has structured the artists’ respective trajectories.

Periodically prompting spectators to join in the sonic experience, the pair attempt to create a space of synchrony and action, where the audience becomes a resonance chamber traveled by vibration and transformed into a disparate choir.
*The Performance was initially commissioned by Mophradat for Read the Room Festival, Kaaitheatre, Brussels 2024

Noor Abed works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, and an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24.

Haig Aivazian’s practice grapples with the metamorphic nature of 3 technologies: artificial light, computation and law. He examines ways in which the administration of light and darkness makes and unmakes persons and transforms material conditions of architecture and geography —how they are inhabited and moved through by humans, animals, objects, machines and other strange creatures. Aivazian was Artistic Director of Beirut Art Center (BAC) from 2020 to 2022, where he founded and edited thederivative.org.