Majlis Talks: Re-seeding Stories

Reseeding Stories, the latest edition of Majlis Talks, gathers artists and audiences in a shared space of remembering, mourning, and renewal. Honouring and reinterpreting the majlis—a space for sitting together in a special assembly (traditionally situated between the public and the private, the individual and the collective) this edition shifts from discursive dialogues toward performative, text- and sound-based artistic practices from the wider region. In Reseeding Stories, the voice becomes both medium and a site for gathering: a space where stories are not only told but re-rooted through the act of listening.

To “reseed” is to counter the violence of uprooting. It is to nurture what has been scattered, to return attention to submerged narratives and unseen continuities that persist beneath forgetting, erasure and silencing. Through different vocal registers that cross spoken word, chanting, humming and sonic layering, the artists’ work in Reseeding Stories honours the ways in which histories in the region live not only in written archives but in murmured recollections, in songs, in rituals, in water and dust. Reseeding Stories invites us to tend to these fragile continuities, to listen for the echoes of what has been obscured yet endures and reclaim storytelling as an embodied form of witnessing and resistance—one that renews communal ties and reanimates both ancestral and ecological knowledge systems.

In the programme, the artists approach reseeding through water, listening, and echoes that navigate the unseen. Jumana Emil Abboud draws upon Palestinian springs and water folklore to weave fluid, more-than-human narratives that hold together devotion, myth, and lived experience. Fazal Rizvi turns to Shia rituals of mourning, tracing how tears and water become both archive and cleansing force, holding grief and potential repair. In rana elnemr’s Echolocation, echoes replace sight, guiding us through unseen worlds where sound becomes a means of access to lost ancestral knowledge. And Safeya Alblooshi listens to the porous acoustics of the majlis itself, layering field recordings, sound archives and synthesized voices to blur the line between intimate and communal space.

Together, these works cultivate a living archive of community—a weave of personal, spiritual, and ecological narratives that germinate across time and place. Listening here becomes a social gesture, an act of witnessing and re-connection, through which what was uprooted may once again take root. In this Majlis Talks, stories behind stories find new vocal expressions, folklore meets futurity, lament becomes witness and sound becomes medium of resilience and reparation: whispered, fractured, remembered, and retold.

Artist Contributions:

Jumana Emil Abboud: The two lives of Bir Ayoub

Jumana Emil Abboud’s spoken-word performance The two lives of Bir Ayoub is shaped by her ongoing interest in water-working and folklore. The work weaves non-linear stories around more-than-human entanglements with water, heritage, memory, and imagination. Drawing from Palestinian springs and expanding through the Water Diviners community, the narrative moves between geographies and voices, fragments of storytelling and recollections of lived experience, where myths and everyday devotions unfold side by side.

Jumana Emil Abboud’s creative practice re-spirits storytelling processes in spoken word, drawing, video, and through Water Diviners gatherings, where stories are living entities, entangled in water and relation, connecting place and possibility. Over the last two decades Jumana Emil Abboud exhibited her work at Dalhousie Art Gallery (2025), Cample Line (2023), TAVROS (2022), documenta 15 (2022), the Jerusalem Show (2009, 2018), Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation (2017), Bildmuseet (2017), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), in addition to the Biennales of Diriyah (2024), Sydney (2022), Venice (2009, 2015), Istanbul (2009), and Sharjah (2005, 2011).

Fazal Rizvi: a tear, drowning a river, drowning an ocean

Fazal Rizvi’s lecture-performance a tear, drowning a river, drowning an ocean works through the image of the tear—its act of tearing up and tearing down. Turning to Shia rituals of mourning and remembrance, Fazal Rizvi explores how grief can return us to the body and the earth-body. Here, mourning becomes both flood and witness, a means of cleansing, repair, and renewal. The work draws on the poetic and performative traditions of marsiya and soz khwani that emerged in South Asia, archiving stories of resistance from the battle of Karbala. Through these forms, Fazal Rizvi traces the journey of water across time and place, from its molecular state to its oceanic and emotional resonances.

Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist from Pakistan. His inquiry rests between the personal, the social and the political. Over the past years, his work has been engaging with the materiality and immateriality of the sea and its borders. Fazal Rizvi keeps returning to the personal and familial as a place of activation, and has been reflecting on ideas of mourning, remembering, memorialising and monument making. Rizvi’s work has been shown in various exhibitions, including Sharjah Biennale (2025), Lahore Biennale (2024 & 2018), Jogja Biennale (2023), Photo Kathmandu (2023), Colomboscope (2019). He has been an artist in residence at the Arcus Studios, Japan, in 2011, and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust award for Gasworks Studios Residency, London in 2014, Pro Helvetia New Delhi Studio residency in Zurich, 2020. He was a resident artist at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands, for the year 2020-21, and at Cite des Arts Paris in 2023. Fazal Rizvi has also been a member of The Tentative Collective.

rana elnemr: Echolocation

In Echolocation, rana elnemr reflects on how species such as bats, dolphins, and whales navigate the world through sound when vision is limited. At a time when words, egos, and certainties crumble, and the world we see no longer mirrors what we imagine, rana elnemr turns to water and echo as guides. The work moves between the surface and depths of perception, where reflection and resonance reveal intertwined stories flowing through ocean and sky—ancient narratives that continue to sound beneath the visible.

rana elnemr’s practice delves into the dynamics of place, time, and existence to question and reframe our ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world. Drawing from nature, history, mythology, and science, her work integrates formal image-making with collaborative ecologies, and engages with urban elements, ancient deities, and both ancestral and contemporary plant and animal species. rana elnemr's work has been exhibited and acquired worldwide. In 2004, she co-founded the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), where she remains an active board member.

Safeya Alblooshi: Bayń wa Bayń

Bayń wa Bayń explores the shifting thresholds between public and private realms—resonating with the majlis, where voices and stories pass fluidly across porous boundaries. Combining field recordings from traditional majlis gatherings with fragments of everyday sonic life and curated performances, the piece is reimagined through modular synthesis. Layered textures of chanting, clapping, and conversational murmurings blur distinctions between intimate and collective listening. By tracing sounds that are present yet translucent, heard but often unacknowledged, Safeya Alblooshi’s work reflects on how attentive listening can uncover hidden resonances of memory, place, and belonging.

Safeya Alblooshi is a sound artist who experiments with found sound via participatory performance and installation. Her work extends to being presented and performed at the Expo 2020 Dubai, Louvre Abu Dhabi, IRCAM Forum, London Design Biennale, Sharjah Art Foundation, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. As the founder of Resound UAE supported by the UAE National Grant for Culture & Creativity, she curated the 4th edition of ElectroFest and collaborated with Mutek.AE. With a BA in Music and currently undergoing an MA in Communications, Safeya completed her research fellowship with the Music and Sound Cultures group at NYU Abu Dhabi.

About the Curators:

Andrea Thal’s practice is situated between curating, publishing, art education, and maintaining and transforming cultural spaces. From 2014 to 2023 Andrea Thal was the artistic director of Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), a Cairo based organisation with a special interest in the overlap of visual culture, artistic practice and critical discourse. In 2023/24 Andrea Thal convened Finding Our Feet (Sommerakademie Paul Klee), an international programme dedicated to methodologies of working together from within situations of crisis. Andrea Thal regularly teaches in formal and informal contexts and is a member of the Cairo Working Group of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC). Before relocating to Egypt, she ran Les Complices*, a self-organised space in Zurich, Switzerland.

Uriel Orlow’s artistic practice is research-driven, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines and people. Working across film, photography, drawing, sound, installation and lecture performance, his work explores memory, colonial legacies, ecological justice, and plants as political actors. Uriel Orlow's work has been presented at major international survey exhibitions including at the Venice Biennale, Manifesta, the Jerusalem Show and biennials in Sharjah, Berlin, Dakar, Kochi, Taipei, Kathmandu, Guatemala as well as at museums and galleries in Lisbon, London, Paris, New York, Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Istanbul, Mexico-City, New Delhi, Zurich and elsewhere. In 2024 he curated the exhibition Knowledge is a Garden at the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art in Zurich. In 2023 he received the Swiss Grand Prix for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim and in 2017 he received the Sharjah Biennial Prize.