Rosalind Nashashibi, Electrical Gaza, All all all, Copenhagen
As I trudged my weary way down to the All all all venue on a rainy day in late summer, I felt like a miserable lump. Meaninglessness had seized me in a firm grip. Medical science might call it a case of depression, but to my mind it was a case of the world being an utter disaster. I sat on the floor and watched the scene that made me fall in love with the Palestinian artist’s poetic video work – and the reason why I recommend this extra highly. In it, a man is preparing falafel and bread for guests in a living room. Friends and family are visiting. You see them laughing and singing – Palestinian men at ease, living a banal everyday life in Gaza. The scene says everything that needs to be said. How poignantly soulful and moving it was to see them live.
ÖrkÅ, Unearth, Hangaren, Copenhagen. Curated by Roserne Sonne.
I rode my bike out to Hangaren on Refshaleøen island to take in Unearth, an experimental platform in the midst of discovering itself as a hybrid of club culture, aesthetics, and art. The club was dim, the crowd hip and queer, and I certainly sensed that more was going on here than just another classic night of bass-thumping clubbing. There was plenty of buzz about the Colombian underground celebrity and drag performer ÖrkÅ (‘supposed to be really out there!’ as someone said). ÖrkÅ appeared as a masked, monstrous body – more akin to a bloodied beast than a human figure – and moved to an intensely gripping soundtrack. I was entirely consumed by the gore universe, not at all sure what I was witnessing. But that didn’t matter. What I relished about this all-encompassing performance was how it made me forget myself entirely. Recoiling from this grotesque spectacle was an absolute delight.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Song is the call, and the land is calling, Glyptoteket and Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen
To know your land intimately and then wander around it as a guest – not by choice, FYI. To observe it behind glass cases in a museum display while History might be erasing you from its pages. What does it mean to put an accurate face to a cultural heritage you have only limited access to? Palestinian artists walk a narrow path here, particularly if they are also deemed radical for seizing aesthetic opportunities to create discursive glitches in a narrative otherwise dominated by colonial powers. I loved this exhibition for being a woodpecker’s attempt to peck through an opaque art world of gimmicks, masks, and false talismans, revealing the true gravitas haunting the art object: the self-legitimisation of a nation. What was special was how Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme inhabited Glyptoteket and redefined cultural heritage in all its intangibility through poetry. Magical and profoundly dignified.
Zahna Siham Benamor is a poet and self-taught artist. She is currently presenting the exhibition Se havet som kulisse, som et cellofanhav, som din mave spist af en krokodille og begravet under et træ (See the Sea as a Backdrop, as a Cellophane Sea, as Your Belly Devoured by a Crocodile and Buried Under a Tree) at All all all, Copenhagen, and recently released the EP Jeg kommer fra Ørkenen (I Come from the Desert ) as part of the artist duo Z AMOR & BJØRK. Her debut poetry collection, Se havet som ansigt (See the Sea as a Face) published by the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology just came out.
