This year’s series of dialogue sessions opens with a conversation between novelist, poet and playwright Ahmed Masoud and visual artist Isshaq Albarbary (joining online), which explores connections across literature, theater, cinema, and the visual arts. Starting from Ahmed's questions, "Where is cultural resistance now? Where was it before?", the discussion offers a reassessment of the terms of artistic and cultural resistance today, placing renewed emphasis on the importance of imagination in representing pasts, presents and futures. Ahmed and Isshaq will be joined in conversation by festival house moderator Yara Yuri Safadi.
Following his presentation on Friday, Ahmed will be giving a Sunday workshop where festival audiences are invited to join him for a how-to course on crafting acts of creative resistance.
Day:
Fri, 10 Oct
Time:
14:00–15:45
Venue:
de Appel
Location:
Foyer
The Dialogue Sessions are a series of conversations taking place throughout the festival, which invite two cultural producers to share short presentations on their practices followed by an extended conversation between them.
Isshaq Albarbary, Little Mouth of Cherries (2022); installation with folding stage, carpet, television, video, and metallic vinyl exhibited in the group exhibition Fear of Property at the Renaissance Society, Chicago
Biographies:
Ahmed Masoud is the author of the acclaimed novels Come What May (2022) and Vanished – The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda (2015). Ahmed is a writer, poet and director who grew up in Palestine and moved to the UK in 2002. He is the founder of Al Zaytouna Dance Theatre (2005-2013). After finishing his PhD research, Ahmed published many journals and articles including a chapter in Britain and Muslim World: A Historical Perspective (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Most recently, Ahmed launched his new artistic initiative called PalArt Collective. For more information, please see www.ahmedmasoud.co.uk
Isshaq Albarbary (b. Beit Jibrin refugee camp, Palestine) is a multidisciplinary artistworking across performance, installation, video, and text. He engages objects andmaterials from refugee camp infrastructures and humanitarian aid as carriers of what he terms stateless refugee Heritage. Informed by his methodology of tanaaqush (Arabic for “discussion,” from naqasha, “to chisel or engrave”), his current work centers craving as an artistic method for sensing and thinking through the body, memory, and matter under the pressures of settler colonialism, incarceration, and bureaucratic erasure. Albarbary is a founding member of Al Maeishah and was part of Campus in Camps. He holds an MFA from HKU, Utrecht, and was a 2017–2018 fellow at BAK.
Yara Yuri Safadi is a Lebanese producer, costume supervisor and curator based in Amsterdam. She curated the Cinema al Fouad, Leiden Shorts and 7eme Lune light, and produced Fasco 2021 by Nicolas Khouri. Yara is also a film programmer and has moderated talks at prominent film festivals, including the 2024 PFFA and the “Retro Palestine” series.
