Jossa by Alserkal
Join Dastaangoi and Faraz Ali for a performative session, celebrating the memories of the iconic Pak Tea House, alongside a reading of selected poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
The (multilingual) interactive session intends to slow down the time to cherish the sublime poetry of Faiz and evoke the listeners to explore their realms of imagination.
Pak Tea House is a historic tea house that was known as a meeting place and was traditionally frequented by Pakistan’s artistic, cultural and literary personalities until the 1990s. Attendees included were: Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto. It became the birthplace of the influential literary movement, the Progressive Writers' Association in Pakistan, known for left-wing politics since its foundation in 1940.
Faraz Ali is UAE based award-winning, interdisciplinary designer and a performing artist. Over the past decade, Ali has studied Urdu literature as both a creative tradition and a sociocultural phenomenon. And to this end, he has engaged in both deep study and experimentation. Ali has collaborated at both local and international levels to foster critical understanding and practice of literature and theatre in particular. In the UAE, Ali has performed at various institutions/initiatives including, Art Dubai, Art Jameel, Alserkal Avenue, Emirates Airline Literature Festival, and Pakistan Association Dubai. Last year, an award-winning campaign ‘Adidas x Ravi campaign’ featured Ali as a performer and a writer. In May 2018 he delivered a performative lecture on the works of the modernist Urdu poet N. M. Rashid (d. 1975) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA.
Dastaangoi is a creative platform based in Dubai and Islamabad that was started in 2020 with the mission of showcasing art, design and people from the Global South to the world.
April 9
10-11PM
Jossa by Alserkal