Please join us at PUBLICS for our Saturday afternoon talk, and screening with interdisciplinary artist, and film-maker Noor Abed, with introductions and moderation by curators Basak Senova and Paul O’Neill. Drinks and refreshments will be served.

This event is part of the Octopus Programme, which is a guided, research-based educational programme encouraging artistic research and production-based collaborations between academies, art institutions, students and professionals. From this diverse network, PUBLICS along with the Saastamoinen Foundation are the Helsinki based partners. Noor Abed’s talk is part of PUBLICS collaboration with the Octopus Programme of courses, tutorials, guest lecturers, activities, exhibitions, screenings, publications, and residencies through a network of institutions, partners and artists in Austria, Finland, Tunisia, Palestine, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey.

Noor Abed’s practice examines choreography and imaginary individual relationships creating situations where social possibilities are rehearsed and performed. Combining forms of the staged (performative) and the ‘documentary’, the work establishes representational modes of documentary intertwined with aspects of the ‘magical’, the ‘mythical’, inspired by everyday life’s contradictions. As the artists states of her work:

“My aim is to naturalize the mode of myth within established methods of representation, as something that is onto-logically necessary to society’s vision of everyday life. My work aims to decentralize images of fixity while at the same time foreground the gaps, silences and abscesses those fixed structures produce. What role do aesthetics play in the performance of the ritual? And can we consider ‘performance’ a method of survival? I aim to examine performances of the community and social movements in relation to rituals of waiting, resistance, and mourning. My interest rests strongly in thinking of the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community. It is a further exploration of the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action. I examine movement as a staged action: What does the stage, any stage, take away from us? What does it contain that remains invisible? And can we examine movement as a sociopolitical form that is rooted with notions of survival and solidarity?”

Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Νew York (2015-16), and Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2016-17). Abed received her BA from the International Academy of Arts in Palestine, and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. She was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2014) and a fellow in documenta (13)’s “Department of Maybe Educatiοn and Public Programs” in Kassel, Germany. A finalist and a third prize-winner in the 2014 Young Artist Award, she was awarded the March Project residency and commission from Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE) in 2016. Abed was awarded residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France) in 2018, the U-jazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (Poland) in 2020, and Raw Material Company in Dakar (Senegal) in 2019, among others. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the “School of Intrusions,” an independent educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine.

Basak Senova is a curator, designer and educator, leads the Octopus Programme and is a Visiting Professor at University of Applied Arts Vienna.

More details of the Octopus Programme:
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