For act two, writers Huw Lemmey and Elvia Wilk engage in a conversation about their overlapping interests and research threads. The act will continue with artist Lydia Ourahmane brings us with her on an audio visual journey into her family's personal photographic and video archive.
| Duration: | 2 hours |
18 h - Huw Lemmey & Elvia Wilk: Language for Centuries
For act two, writers Huw Lemmey and Elvia Wilk engage in a conversation about their overlapping interests and research threads, particularly those that relate to mysticism and mystical encounters. They will touch on embodiment, spirituality, and occult practices in relation to radical political movements. Focusing on groups/religions such as Quakerism and The Shakers. They will also discuss historical figures like the 11th-century nun Hildegard von Bingen, who was co-author of Lemmey´s 2020 novel Unknown Language, and a point of reference for much of Wilk´s writing. Viewers are encouraged but not required to read a series of texts in advance of the discussion, made available upon registration.
Huw Lemmey is a novelist, artist and critic. He is the author of three novels: Unknown Language, Red Tory, and Chubz. He has written for The Guardian, Frieze, Flash Art, Tribune, the Architectural Review, Art Monthly, New Humanist, the White Review, and L’Uomo Vogue, amongst others. As an artist and filmmaker, his work has been shown at the ICA, Lux Biennial of Moving Image, Mumok Vienna, Warsaw Museum of Contemporary Art and the Design Museum, London.
Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, BOMB, and the Baffler, and she is a contributing editor at e-flux journal. Her first novel, Oval, was published in 2019 by Soft Skull Press and a book of essays called Death By Landscape will be published in 2022, also by Soft Skull.
19 h - Lydia Ourahmane: House of Hope
For part two of act two, artist Lydia Ourahmane brings us with her on an audio visual journey into her family's personal photographic and video archive. Her contribution follows a spiritual shift in her practice and specifically a body research initiated through her recent exhibition Survival in the Afterlife where the artist delved into an archive of images, documents and videos documenting a spiritual movement and refuge called House of Hope established by her parents in the early nineties during the Algerian Civil War. Through her investigation into these materials Ourahmane asks personal and general questions about belief and myth making.
Lydia Ourahmane was born in 1992 in Saïda, Algeria, Lydia Ourahmane lives and works between Europe and North Africa. She graduated from Goldsmiths University of London in 2014 with The Third Choir, an installation that involved the first instance of the exportation of an artwork from Algeria since the country gained independence from French colonial rule in 1962. Thereafter she continued to test the possibilities for charging and converting the elements of the physical world as these move between borders, generations and dimensions. With works such as In the Absence of Our Mothers, presented at Chisenhale Gallery in 2018 and Barzakh, presented in 2021 at the Kunsthalle Basel and Triangle-Astérides in Marseilles, Ourahmane’s evolving research and practice continue to raise key questions about the connections between spirituality, contemporary geopolitics, migration and the complex histories of colonialism.
