Please join us on January 22nd at 5.30 pm for the launch of Noor Abed’s book, Stars at Midday – نجوم الضُهر, a personal production diary documenting the making of her film A Night We Held Between. The evening will begin with a screening of Abed’s film A Night We Held Between (2024), followed by a conversation with Noor Abed and Paul O’Neill.
Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal production diary in which the artist and filmmaker Noor Abed compiles visual and poetic notes from the production phase of her film A Night We Held Between, filmed in Palestine in 2023 with family and friends.
Like the film whose production it chronicles, the book interweaves narrative fragments, song and diaristic observations, creating a fusion of natural and composed sequences of movement, of documentary and fictional elements.
Through a choreography of bodies, sites, stories, and temporalities, Abed’s work prompts contemplation on the manifestations of social action and resistance in everyday life.
The film A Night We Held Between (2024) centers around Song for The Fighters, which was found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act.
The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine – caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys – the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.
Noor Abed (1988, Palestine) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She works at the intersection of performance and film. Through a process of image making, her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, IDFA Pavilion Shorts, Amsterdam, Alchemy film & Arts Festival, UK, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Lagos Biennale, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, and Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, among others. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was a curatorial assistant in documenta fifteen, kassel 2021-22, and an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. She was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.
