Join us at Masahat festival 2023 as we celebrate the vibrant arts and cultural scene from the Arab world in a variety of events including concerts, debates, film screenings, artist talks, culinary experiences, reading circles, workshops and more.

 

This year’s Masahat festival theme focuses on re-membering as a process of artistic and cultural production.

 

Bringing together artists, scholars, journalists and cultural practitioners from Norway, the diaspora and from our home-countries, Masahat festival 2023 will delve deeper into issues like the right to history, competing narratives, national and unofficial archives and the politics of memory.

 

This year we want to think of archives as opportunities to engage alternative narratives, at a time marked by grave political crime and atrocious violence. We will also think about microhistories, and reflect on the lives and pasts of ordinary people as one way to seek a political community liberated from the stronghold of authoritarian powers.

 

Food and music will invite audiences to reflect on their own memories and the importance of remembering in times of defeat.

 

Finally, 2023 marks twenty years after the invasion of Iraq and thirty years after the Oslo peace accords, events that had a significant deleterious impact on the present reality of the Levant, and the festival will invite scholars and historians to reflect upon those two events and on the right to history.

 

By deploying different scales of memory work, Masahat festival hopes to generate an interest and a debate about memory and remembering from a diaspora perspective through a variety of media and modes of iteration.

 

You will find us at Melahuset, Deichman Bjørvika, Blå, VEGA Scene, and the National Museum among other places around Oslo.

 

Check out the full program now! Follow us on social media, and share the Facebook event with your friends.