Liquid Entities
AREEJ HUNITI & ELIZA GOLDOX
Beneath us she resides, a giant fish that carries the world
Your feet on her back
The river in her, and her body in the forgotten river
Do you feel the river under your skin?
A never stopping stream
Moving
Without a moment of stillness or silence
Where does it come from? Where will it go?
They call the river Al-Seil and they used to call the fish Bahamut
She is so immense and radiant. One cannot bear her sight
All the seas of the world, placed in one of her nostrils, would seem like a
mustard seed laid in the driest land
The sun touches her skin
They say a bed of sand stretches on top of Bahamut
Upon it stands a bull called Kuyootà
on its forehead rests a crag of ruby
on the crag there is water, on the water floats the earth
Bahamut rests on airless wind
the wind remains on mist
What lies beneath the mist is never ending darkness
A vast blackness that inhabits nothing but holes for possible futures.
The exhibition Liquid Entities is realised as an environment that mingles fathomless fauna, floods and fictions connected to the city and its voices. Through video, text, sound and found material, the work simulates the life of a buried river, the womb of a fish and imaginations for the future.
Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox's work focuses on collective imagining, as a practice to engage with the human condition within political and social systems. Through using new media technologies the artist duo builds spheres based on speculative futures and fictions. How can collective imagining be attained while collapsing narratives and geographies?
This exhibition project was part of the third phase of Junctions program at The Lab- Darat al Funun (2019/2019), bringing together artists and cultural practitioners that look at the production and reproduction of a hegemonic gender space, and explore tactics of subversion and negotiation. From meditations on the role of myth and fiction and the simulation of buried histories, to interventions made on existing legal texts and the use of new media technologies, the multifaceted program evokes new forms of belonging that transgress normative frameworks and categories and address the intersectionality of gender, race and class. Accompanying discursive events carve up a critical space that moves beyond mainstream, neoliberal and neocolonial perspectives on gender relations, drawing instead on alternative discourses from the periphery.
Accompanying Events
Workshop: They Do Not Speak of the Fish But of the Tiger in the Mirror
What is the meaning of myth and fiction as parallel narratives in times of constant confrontation with dystopian forecasts? What if we re-imagine those creatures from myth and bring them back to life? What can they tell us about the desires of the past and the relevance of unlearning existing knowledge to collectively imagine different future possibilities? How can we connect with the rivers we once knew. What can the river of stone tell us about its life or about the bodies of water that remember it?
Film Screening: Before I forget
Can thinking of us as living underwater, trigger the imagination for different future possibilities? Join us for a film screening of “Before I forget” by Mariam Mekiwi as part of Liquid Entities exhibition, where we will think of how water not only connects and sustains us but also challenges the categories that ground the domains of social, environmental and political thought. Before I Forget is a science-fiction story set in an indistinct coastal region, between land and sea, above and below water. Along with the film we will be presenting "Buried at Sea", a poem by Sara El Kamel.
The event is facilitated by artist Areej Huniti.
Lecture Performance: Um Ezzein
Um Ezzein, your spirit is so glorious,
In the stream of the River.. Oh Jemmaliya
A lecture-performance by Joud Al-Tamimi and Areej Huniti that draws on sonic heritage and ritual from the Tunisian coast (Sahel), to summon the myth of “Um Ezzein”- connecting female voices from the past, present and future.
Poetry Reading: Intersectional Recitations
A poetry night featuring recitations of contemporary poetry by women from different parts of the Global South. The selected poems will be in Arabic and English. Those who attend are welcome to bring and recite their own writings or poems by writers they admire that relate to anticolonial and intersectional conversations on women’s experiences.