Housewaming: A Happy Ending, part IV: A Dweller's Longing by Jumana Emil Abboud and Salia de la tierra by Mercedes Azpilicueta
17:30–20:30
Image: Salia de la Tierra by Mercedes Azpilicueta
Image: Hide Your Water from the Sun. Courtesy of Jumana Emil Abboud and Issa Freij
Image: Hide Your Water from the Sun. Courtesy of Jumana Emil Abboud and Issa Freij
Schedule
17:00 Doors open
17:30 Opening remarks
18:00 - 18:30
A Happy Ending, part IV: A Dweller's Longing
Performance by Jumana Emil Abboud
18:45 - 19:15
Salía de la tierra [It came out of the earth]
Performance by Mercedes Azpilicueta
19:30 - 20:00
Second part | A Happy Ending, part IV: A Dweller's Longing
Performance by Jumana Emil Abboud
A Happy Ending, part IV: A Dweller's Longing
Performance by Jumana Emil Abboud
The artist wishes to recall a folktale from nine or nine-hundred years ago, a tale from Palestine and from the world. A tale dismissed by the world of today. Abboud's storytelling emerges from several endangered water sources in Palestine and the inherited tales they inspire through time. What unfolds, as the artist walks us through the natural landscape, is a multi-layered poem encompassing water-lore, myth, metaphor, imagination and audience participation that all respond to the difficulty of present-day human and more-than-human entanglements.
Salía de la tierra [It came out of the earth]
Housewarming cleansing ritual and performance by Mercedes Azpilicueta with sound by Constanza Castagnet
Mercedes Azpilicueta's artistic practice brings together different figures, from the past and the present, who address the vulnerable or collective body from a decolonial feminist perspective. In fluid, associative connections, she confronts rigid narratives of history in an attempt to dismantle them and make room for the affective and dissident voices to emerge. As such, her work manifests itself in performative and sculptural installations inspired by speculative and fictional Latin American literature, neo-baroque art history, contemporary popular culture and new materialist theory. In Salía de la tierra Mercedes initiates a cleansing of the building with sage, laurel and rosemary. The Ruda plant will also be present in spirit. A letter composed by the artist and addressed to the guests, containing poems, allusions to performance works from the archive and songs, will be read by the artist. As a remnant of the performance, an altar composed by de Appel's team will be left in the exhibition space.
Jumana Emil Abboud (born 1971, Shefa’amer) lives and works in Jerusalem and London and is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her interests lie in oral histories, the investigation of personal and collective stories and mythologies, particularly, folk tales and their sites of being and unbeing. Over the last two decades, Abboud’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Cample Line, Scotland (2023), Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2023), Biennale of Sydney (2022), Documenta 15 (2022), Common Grounds: Story / Heritage, Casco Art Institute, Utrecht (2020); The Jerusalem Show (2018); Sharjah Biennial off site (2017); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2016); Venice Biennial (2015, 2009); and Istanbul Biennale (2009), among many others.
Mercedes Azpilicueta is an artist from Buenos Aires living and working in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice gathers various characters from the past and the present who address the vulnerable or collective body from a decolonial feminist perspective. As such, her work manifests in performative and sculptural installations being inspired by speculative and fictional Latino literature, Neo-Baroque art history, contemporary popular culture and new materialism theory. She was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 2015-16, and received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in 2017. Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Göttingen (2023); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2022); Gasworks, London (2021); CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2021); Museion, Bolzano/Bozen (2020); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2018). Azpilicueta was nominated for the Prix de Rome 2021.
