When my heart looks for you, where will it find you?
When my heart looks for you, where will it find you?
A workshop inviting participants to enact a series of scores, including The People’s Mic Khutba, that explore witnessing, testimony, grief and mourning, facilitated by Mezna and Sadia, and accompanied by Sakina Ali.
An inter-generational workshop open to BIPOC and their elders, who are engaged or interested in ritual practices of grief, mourning, body work or somatic practices of care.
Reservations for this workshop are now closed.
The word shaheed is used for both witness and martyr in languages ranging from Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Balochi, Pushto, Kashmiri, Persian, Swahili, Hausa and Somali. Amidst the scale of ongoing genocides and catastrophes across the world, this workshop attempts to hold a space for mourning, commemoration, and unfathomable grief. In a dimly lit space, participants will be led through a series of scores, including The People’s Mic Khutba (PMK) facilitated by Sadia and Mezna. They will be joined by Sakina Ali, who will recite an elegiac poem in Urdu penned by Munshi Chhunnilal Dilgeer, from which the title of the workshop is drawn.
ReadBios
Formed in 2015, by an interdisciplinary group of collaborators, A Future Collective makes archives, writes scores, creates site specific installations, facilitates non-performances and collaborations with communities, institutions and individuals across the world. Their work was exhibited at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) and Performance Space New York (2018). Its members are currently based between the US, the UK, Palestine and Pakistan.
Sadia Shirazi is a writer, curator, architect, and scholar based between London and New York. Shirazi’s interdisciplinary practice moves between text, installation, exhibitionary and archival practices. Their writing on art, architecture, and performance appears in frieze, e-flux journal, and Bidoun, as well as artist catalogues, peer-reviewed journals, and edited volumes. Shirazi was previously curator of International Art at the Tate Modern where they curated exhibitions, including Rasheed Araeen: Zero to Infinity (2024), and worked on acquisitions of underrepresented artists from South Asia and the diaspora for the museum’s permanent collection. Their collaborative work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial, Performance Space New York, and the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi.
Sakina Ali is a fashion designer, vocalist and artist. Born in Lahore, she lives and works in Chicago. Ali is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Department of Fashion Design where she was a recipient of the Book Award (2006) and earned a Master’s in History from University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. Ali works with photography and performance clubs in Chicago and has had her collaborative work with A Future Collective shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial and Performance Space New York. She enjoys gardening and is an avid birdwatcher.
Mezna Qato is a historian, writer, and organiser based between Cambridge, Chicago, and Tulkarm. Her work is primarily concerned with histories, lives, and movements of refugee and exiled communities. Her writing on archives, education, dispossession and destruction appears in journals, blogs, zines, letters, placards, emails, and post-it notes. She is co-convenor of the ‘Archives of the Disappeared’ Network, is a member of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, the US Palestinian Community Network, British Palestinian Committee, and other formations, visible and not so visible. Her collaborative artistic work has been shown in Venice, New York, Liverpool, Bergen, Ramallah and Amman.
