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: 
  1. Angle of Incidence (4 mins) by Mira Adoumier 
  2. 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 
  1. الحلقة الأولى / ِEpisode 1 وحيدة في البيت / Home Alone 
  2. 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.