2024
Sunday 22 September
Another Sky Market
Cafe Oto
12-3pm
Free
Our second annual independent market – co-presented with The Mosaic Rooms Bookshop – brings together music, zines, books, crafts, textiles, gifts, honey and more.
Stalls from:
Guest video installation:
Musiqa li Falasteen, موسيقى لفلسطين by Maqam.TV
A path, a portal, an embrace. A call, a prayer, a hand on a chest, a fist, a seed, a fruit, an ocean, a star, a stone.
Musiqa li Falasteen, موسيقى لفلسطين, the latest transmission from Maqam.TV, is stitched from words, patterns, textures and gestures from Palestine and beyond in the region, to honour Palestinian people, their musical and poetic legacies, and the ways in which sumood is expressed. We invite you to watch, listen and embrace the piece during the festival, and to carry the melodies with you after it ends.
Musiqa li Falasteen موسيقى لفلسطين was crafted in an act of devotion, a near spiritual process of deep listening where for many of us it seemed a deafening silence had fallen. As an offering, Musiqa li Falasteen موسيقى لفلسطين can be experienced in a range of shapes and forms, ways that do not necessarily fit its initial container; in parts, with or without the video broadcast, in physical spaces, in online spaces that are not theirs. Squeezed in between events, as here, or absorbed into other programmes, as at the Arab British Centre. It is able to shapeshift and morph into whatever, wherever, it is needed, transmission taking precedence above all. It has been shared in parts in Marrakech and on Radio Al Hara, and now both visual and audio together.
It is presented as part of As We Are, Might Have Been and Could Be, a three-year visual arts programme at the Arab British Centre curated by Jessica El Mal. The programme aims to open up the possibilities of Arab Britain beyond the factual or historical, with room for play, interpretation and critique. Each project, whether a new commission, a workshop or a gathering, is a negotiation between past and present, fact and fiction, an embrace of the grey areas for colourful imagination.
This is a free event at Cafe Oto.
Access:
All events take place on the ground floor, with step-free access and accessible toilets.
We are more than happy to reserve you seats and/or space for a wheelchair.
To arrange any of the above, or if you have any questions to help make your visit more comfortable, please email us here.
Maqam.TV as an inherent broadcasting channel airing video content from mainly North to Central Africa to South to central Asia online and offline the term broadcasting is taken in its two senses here for one thing it’s a matter of communicating a given content and further it’s a matter of sowing seeds in a given area by hand and so the back is to the breeze the walk is slow-paced the casting is measured Maqam.TV holds of joy within yeah anger too it gets its tender for gestures of liberation resistance reparation and healing and grew from the urgency and contesting archiving protocols and in hijacking broadcasting frequencies it wishes for a read addressing and thus it stands.
Photo: Sara Benabdallah
Jessica El Mal is a British-Moroccan curator, artist and writer who centres care, collectivity and notions of resistance as a way of world building; a way of taking decolonial, feminist and queer methodologies out of the theoretical realm and into one of practice. As well as curating for the Arab British Centre, she is also the co-director of A.MAL Projects, an art and research initiative between Europe and North Africa, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds.