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.
This workshop has limited spaces, please reserve a place. If you can no longer attend, please let us know so we can open up the space to someone else.
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’s research explores histories of social, economic, and political transformation amongst stateless populations in the Middle East. In particular, She examines the social history of Palestinians in exile. Through gendered and classed histories of everyday lives, and utilising diverse and new archival practices developed through a long and close relationship with archivists and Arabic archival collections across the Middle East, she expands the possibilities of what can be written about the exiled in transnational social histories in the region and across the global south.
Mezna is currently completing a book on education for Palestinians. Future projects include a micro-historical study of the Palestinians of Haiti, and a social-economic study of the Kadoorie School, agrarian education and philanthropy in the Middle East.
She co-convene the ‘Archives of the Disappeared’ Research Initiative, and have curated conversations, workshops, readings, and seminars on the problem of archival retrieval under and after mass violence and annihilation.
Mezna’s collaborative artwork with ‘A Future Collective’ was in the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial’s Bahrain Pavilion (2018) and Performance Space in New York (2018).
Mezna is Margaret Anstee Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and was previously a Spencer Fellow at the National Academy of Education, and Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. As a Travelling Research Fellow in Takhayyul Project, She is developing a study of everyday socialities of imagination in the long century of Palestinian liberation work.
Artists
Sadia Shirazi
