Protest in
Movement
Masahat, KORO – Public Art Norway and Kunstnernes Hus welcome you to one-day seminar at Kunstnernes Hus on the theme of protest. The program includes lectures, panel discussions, films and performances featuring both Norwegian and international artists, all of whom are concerned in different ways with building a solidarity movement. Many of them have connections to Palestine and Lebanon.
Program
10:00 – 10:15 | Registration – coffee and light refreshments
10:15 – 10:25 | Opening by Øystein Strand, KORO Director
10:25 – 10:30 | Welcome remarks by Rana Issa and Truls Ramberg
10:30 – 11:30 | Keynote Lecture by Helga Tawil-Souri
11:30 – 11:45 | Break
11:45 – 13:15 | Artist talk panel on practice, artistic freedom, art, institutions, and critique. Participants: Helle Siljeholm, Mira Adoumier, Mia Habib, Jumana Manna. Moderator: Sarah Lookofsky
13:15 – 14:10 | Light lunch
14:10 – 15:15 | Panel discussion on art and space. Art can change meaning in different spaces, but it can also transform public space. What spaces exist for art to influence public spaces? Participants: Khalid Albaih, Ayman Azrak, Rana Issa. Moderator: Nikhil Vettukattil
15:15 – 15:30 | Break
15:30 – 17:00 | Panel discussion on art and social movements. Art has historically played a significant role in social movements. This discussion will explore these connections through an art historical perspective. Participants: Noor Abed, Dora Garcia, Sami Khatib. Moderator: Bojana Cvejic
18:00 – 19:00 | Short Film Program
19:15 – 20:15 | Listening performance: Nothing Will Remain other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World by Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian
Description of panels and performances
How is artistic freedom defined in practice concerning art, institutions, and the ability of artists to safely criticize power structures and art institutions? Artists today face increasing censorship. Art is considered dangerous by powerful institutions, leading to artists being canceled and contracts annulled. How do artists perceive their relationship with institutions and the public attacks on artists happening in many places? Should art remain steadfast in its role of social critique, and how can artistic expressions be shaped in response to societal challenges such as democracy and the precarious working conditions typical for artists and cultural workers?
How can art challenge our awareness of space? What constitutes public space? Who remains unseen in public space, and how can art help defend an open, equal, and sustainable society? How does art challenge dominance, disrupt perception, and create room for alternative political imagination and possibilities?
Throughout history, art has played a significant role in social movements. In many liberation struggles and recent decades of global protests, artists have worked closely with activists and militias to communicate political messages. This discussion will specifically explore these connections in relation to contemporary authoritarianism, imperial and colonial wars, and social and political protests.
This short film program presents protest as an impetus and intention for art. Curating films that combine a strong criticality towards hegemonic violence that threatens both people and earth, the films are selected for the complexities of their oppositional arch of expression that combines the political and the intimate, the collective struggle and collective grief, with strong articulations of the values and the causes artists are fighting for. The program goes as follows:
- Two films produced by Masahat in collaboration with KORO in 2024 on the genocide:
- Angle of Incidence (4 mins) by Mira Adoumier
- Algorithims of Suffocation (7.31 mins) by Islam Shabana
- Short film on the memory of Refaat al-Areer (3 mins) by Jumana Manna.
- Two short films by Haig Aivazian (10 mins) You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light قد تملكون القناديل، لكن الضوء لنا
- الحلقة الأولى / ِEpisode 1 وحيدة في البيت / Home Alone
- الحلقة الثانية / ِEpisode 2: كحل الليل / Eyeshadow Dark as Night
- A Night We Held Between (30 mins) by Noor Abed
"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 a recent correspondence spanning several months, the pair exchanged 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.
Guest artists bios
Noor Abed (b.1988 Jerusalem) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the “School of Intrusions,” an educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine.
Mira Adoumier (b.1985, New York) is an Oslo-based Lebanese/French filmmaker Through her work with fictional short films and film essays, she explored characters living at the margins of in-between worlds, while also in parallel experimenting with the formal aspect of the image. Her first feature film, ERRANS premiered at CPH:DOX 2020 in the next:wave competition. She is part of the Camelia Committee (انا في الكاميليا), a collective that explores hybrid forms of writing for and in cinema.
Ayman al Azraq is a filmmaker, photographer, and mixed-media artist. His short film The Passport has been screened at prestigious venues such as the National Museum of Cinema in Turin, Italy, and the Cologne International VideoArt Festival in Germany. In 2015, Ayman’s short film Oslo Syndrome was showcased at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo, the Dubai International Film Festival, and the London Palestinian Film Festival. Ayman’s documentary film Into My Lungs delves into the harsh working conditions in Bangladesh’s textile industry. It was screened at Kunstnernes Hus in 2022. His mixed media installation, The Lost Tapes of a People’s Tribunal 1982, was exhibited at Fotogalleriet in Oslo during the 2023/2024 season.
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. Between 2020-2022, Aivazian was Artistic Director of the Beirut Art Center where he was founding editor of thederivative.org
Khalid Albaih is a Sudanese award-winning artist, political cartoonist and cultural producer based between Doha and Oslo. Besides his two books KHARTOON! and Sudan Retold, he publishes his political cartoons and political commentary on current affairs on various established media outlets, publications and books. Khalid is the founder of award-winning space sharing platform getfadaa.com, Sudan Art and Design, Sudan Artist Fund and the fashion blog focusing on migrant workers in Doha @DohaFashionFridays and Khartoonmag.com a political cartoons and comics online magazine.
Bojana Cvejic is an Oslo-based dramaturg and researcher, and her writing, performances and videos interweave performance matters and critical theory. Before she came to teach Dance Theory at KhiO, she was mainly engaged in collective platforms for self-organized work and self-education, including Performing Arts Forum (www.pa-f.net, St. Erme, France, where I am still active).
Ingri Midgard Fiksdal is a choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in artistic research from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts titled Affective Choreographies (2019). Ingri’s work on affect has in recent years taken her into discourses on perspective and privilege. Ingri is concerned with how practice and theory are entangled in her work in a way where neither is perceived as anterior to the other.
Dora García is an artist, teacher and researcher who lives and works in Oslo. Dora García sculpts and arranges knowledge as a material in its own right. Using extensive documentary research, she delves into complex topics such as the history of the irrational, subconscious mind, and forges links with the great names in literature – including Walser, Artaud and Joyce. The oeuvre of Dora García folds up into writing, film, installation, and performance, as is centered around stories which she organizes and stages, conjuring situations designed to engage the visitor and trigger unique, introspective experiences.
Mia Habib: is an Oslo-based dancer, performer and choreographer working at the intersection of performance, exhibitions, publications, lectures, teaching, mentoring and curating always guided by a choreographic logic. Her work is described to hold a culture critical perspective on body, identity, society and dance.
Rana Issa is the artistic director of Masahat, an arts and culture organization and festival in Oslo. She is a curator, writer and translator focusing on literary and contemporary artistic practices entangled with Arabic cultural history. She works at the intersection between public humanities, activist engagements, and academic curiosity. Rana is the author of The Modern Arabic Bible (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and Tung tids tale (Press Forlag, 2025).
Sami Khatib’s work spans the fields of Aesthetic Theory, Critical Theory, Media Theory and Cultural Studies with a special focus on the thought of Walter Benjamin. His area of competence is in 19th and 20th century Continental Philosophy with an emphasis on early Frankfurt School, Kant, German Idealism, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and post-Structuralism. He is author of a book on Walter Benjamin (Marburg: Tectum, 2013); an English translation, titled “'Teleology without End.' Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic,” is forthcoming.
Sara Lookofsky is a curator, writer and art historian who is Director of Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. Previously, she was Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). Before coming to Norway in 2020, she was Associate Director of The Museum of Modern Art's International Program, where she worked with programs related to modern and contemporary art in a global perspective. She was General Advisor for the 9th Berlin Biennial organized by the DIS collective, and, from 2010 to 2014, she headed the Curatorial Studies program at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Complementing these institutional positions, she has written for a variety of publications as well as curated exhibitions on an independent basis.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
Helle Siljeholm is a choreographer and visual artist, based in Oslo. She holds a BA (hons.) from London Contemporary Dance School in 2003. In 2016, she graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Oslo Academy of Fine Art (KHiO). Her artistic practice involves film, installation, sculpture, choreography, and performance.
Islam Shabana’s work is situated in the intersection of technology with Islamic philosophy, mythology and studies of human cognition. In his works, he explores concepts such as system-social dynamics, religious performative rituals and occult practices, by means of poetry, simulation, science fiction and speculative scenarios. Examining how different technologies are interweaving these concepts producing/reproducing entangling structures between myth, fiction, and physical realities.
Helga Tawil-Souri: Helga works on technology, media, culture, territory and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Palestine. Helga is co-editor with Dina Matar of Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst 2016) and Producing Palestine (Bloomsbury 2024), and currently serves on the editorial boards of Social Text and Public Culture. She has published a wide range of articles and chapters on checkpoints, borders, infrastructure, media and telecom, surveillance, and other topics, and has been experimenting with collage and visual forms of expression.
Nikhil Vettukattil (b.1990, Bengaluru, India) is an artist and writer based in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences.