Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash for Your Girls? is a compelling and cacophonic sound installation, built up around the oratorial tradition of the Shiite ceremony of Ashura. The Ashura tradition, an annual ritual in which mourners commemorate the unjust slaughter of Imam al Hussein (626-680 CE), here becomes the dramaturgical framework in which to develop a new language: a discourse of liberation. The performance decodes and recodes, orders and choreographs the theatrical effects, techniques and mechanisms of the Ashura ceremony, and with it poses contemporary questions about what it means to shape oneself as a witness-subject instead of the legal subject. What does it mean to script, rehearse, orate, narrate, reproduce, cry, sing, choreograph, create scenography for, and ‘behold’ justice?
In her work, Rana Hamadeh explores the production of knowledge and meanings. With this performance she continues to build on the lexicon that she has been developing since 2011 with her long-running project The Alien Encounters, a series of artistic performances that explore the relationships between criminology, epidemiology and theatre.
"What constitutes a “project" for me, is the labor involved in breaching - betraying - the very epistemological grounds from which my theoretical/aesthetic concerns stem. And what constitutes a “new” project is the shift from one epistemological plane to another—even while still working with the same set of concerns. This new plane starts a new journey of what I’d like to call “epistemological treachery.” This is the most precise summary of the way I work - or at least, the way I desire to think of my work." - in conversation with Carolina Rito for Mousse MagazineThe performance is part of the project
EURASIA − A Landscape of Mutability at M HKA.