Domestic Departures: (Im)mobility, loss and resilience in an uncertain world

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Join us on 23 November, 2024 as the recipients of the Alserkal Arts Foundation Research Grants 2022-2024 present compelling, multidisciplinary projects that address permanence and belonging, urging us to reimagine how we relate to our lives and land(scapes) when faced with slow ecocide alongside disruptive political violence.

The convening features conversations & research displays with six multidisciplinary practitioners—Khalda El Jack, Zainab Gaafar, Lubnah Ansari, Natasha Maru, Rhea Shah, and Maitha AlSuwaidi—using experimental cartography, immersive installations, and independent zines.

In This land (is ours, yours, whose?) (هذه الارض (لنا, لكم, لمنو؟ architects and urban researchers Khalda El Jack and Zainab Gaafar document stories of three settlements of south Khartoum to examine how the harsh realities of war unmake and reconfigure our relationships with land. Artist and researcher Lubnah Ansari’s Tracing Temple Ties studies burgeoning dynamics between India and the UAE, where fissures born out of colonial legacies mutate other relational worlds. Through Can we be(come) nomadic?, social scientist Natasha Maru and environmental designer Rhea Shah explore multi-species environments through the lens of mobile pastoralists in Western India, proposing ways to re-inhabit an embodied ground in the fight for environmental justice. With The Domesticity of Wanderers, artist and writer Maitha AlSuwaidi sifts through stories of Ajami identity and collective memory across the Arab and Persian Gulf(s), while looking at the inner world of the home as a totem and a tool.

Presentations take place from 2 to 6pm on November 23, while select material relating to their projects will remain on display until November 24 at Jossa by Alserkal (Warehouse 45).

Biographies

Khalda El Jack is a trained architect and urban researcher currently based in Belgium with ten years of experience. Her current work explores how displacement has shaped Khartoum through spatially understanding the entanglements that lie between the movement of bodies, movements of resistance and the movement of nature. With a particular focus on the peri-urban landscape transformation of Khartoum, her interests focus on critical mapping as a tool to showcase the entanglements that constitute the spaces of the city, drawing from various forms of situated knowledge, resistance and inhabitation practices.

Zainab Gaafar is an Architect, researcher, and multidisciplinary project manager, she has a special interest in urban space and urban subjects. For the past ten years, she has been roaming the streets of Khartoum and documenting to try to understand the urban fabric, and how people utilise the built environment and interact with the city. Currently, she is the founder of Studio Urban, an experimental practice with an exploration lens that conducts research, maps out different phenomenon, and experiments with the use of different technologies, art, and visual and audio mediums as a tool to communicate knowledge to a bigger audience.

Lubnah Ansari is an artist, researcher, and community facilitator. Engaging in feminist ethnography and the politics of image-making, she explores silences, intimacies and agencies in India and the Gulf. She holds a B.A. in Social Research from NYU Abu Dhabi and is currently pursuing an M.A. at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Natasha Maru is a multidisciplinary social scientist and policy consultant with experience working with smallholder farmers and pastoralists in India. She has recently finished a PhD from the Institute of Development Studies, UK, where she studied the temporal experiences of mobility among the Rabari pastoralists of western India. Grounded in a deep ethnography, she shows how pastoralists ‘pace’ themselves in a rapidly modernising context. Moving away from the hegemony of the written word, Natasha wants to foray into a politically aware arts based medium for relating and expressing. A manifestation of her love and resistance, her artistic practice centres people's experiences in creative processes of knowledge-making and representation. An ever-evolving process at the intersection of social life, her art seeks to breach the distance between humans, more-than-humans and our living environment.

Rhea Shah is a trans-disciplinary environmental designer who believes design should be a cultural manifestation of ecological processes. She is concerned with the pursuit of beauty that emerges from dissolving culturally imagined dualities like built and unbuilt, human and other-than-human, organism and environment. She has worked as an architect, landscape architect, design researcher, lm curator and design instructor. She currently runs a rural design, art and research practice, Aranya design, that applies a critical design lens to augment resilience in the ecological, hydrological and architectural networks of her region. She is interested in developing uniquely place based design, critical thought and technology emergent from indigenous and rural and more than human traditional ecological and cultural knowledge. She enjoys all tactile explorations and journeys of curiosity. Rhea most prefers conversing through drawing and food.

Maitha AlSuwaidi is a performance artist, writer, and researcher, marrying the three disciplines together in exploring intersectional/interdisciplinary themes within the ecosystems she exists and has existed in. She is a performance artist in both experimental and traditional theatre spaces. As a writer, Maitha publishes fiction and nonfiction, and has performed her spoken poetry in internationally renowned spaces like the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Maitha graduated from NYUAD with a bachelors in Political Science, and from the University of Oxford with a master’s in Public Policy as a UAE Rhodes Scholar. She aims to synthesize her learnings in policymaking, politics, and digital scholarship in her art and research practice.

Image courtesy Khalda ElJack and Zainab Gaafar.