The Pot with Attempting Abla Nazira (Moza Almatrooshi & Marwa Benhalim)

 

Join artists Moza Al Matrooshi and Marwa Benhalim- founders and curators of Attempting Abla Nazira in a roundtable discussion around foods and their accompanying idioms, anecdotes and memes. By taking part in this Suhoor Happening, you will have the opportunity to join in the ceremonious preparation of a refreshment, and deep dive into critical nuances around food, its origins, and pop culture.

 

This event is part of Jam’atna: Time, Synchrony and the Divine, a series of four online Suhoor Happenings put together by Nahla Tabbaa, exploring the communal spirit of Ramadan in a multi-dimensional way and addressing the Holy Month’s reconstruction of time. The invited hosts are inspired by our restructured eating habits, surrendering and the altering of our pace as a sacred act to synchronise with the holy month and transcend our daily urban rhythms and cycles. Each host invites participants of the happening to rethink how their own creative practices synchronise and align with the values of the Holy Month.

 

This event is conducted in English, and open to all ages.
To view the live Happening, please register on this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TaM3XdYKR7yXbHN7gEheVw
To register as a participant, please fill the following form: https://forms.gle/aGFwcxLk172iCSsu9

 

Marwa Benhalim, a Cairo based visual artist and Moza Almatrooshi, a Sharjah based visual artist, have been the main collaborators on their shared research project “Attempting Abla Nazira” - Marwa and Moza met in Cairo in 2019, while Moza was an artist in residence at the Townhouse Gallery, and Marwa was preparing for her solo exhibition, “The Cookbook”, which was exhibited in Medrar for Contemporary Art in Cairo. After discussing the commonalities within their work, the two artists remained in contact, and held several virtual studio visits soon after the social distancing guidelines for COVID-19 were circulating, and so, “Attempting Abla Nazira” was born out of the isolation and quarantine-scape in March 2020. It became an online platform that engages women working in creative and intellectual fields, through cooking, writing, reflecting on food in relation to cultural production, gender politics and regional socio-economics.

Moza & Marwa will engage in a research residency called Antithetical Domesticity in Sharjah, which will bring together their findings from the past year and materialise it. They will also open up their studio to participants who wish to delve deeper with them on topics around food and: feminism, fiction, art, politics, etc. This will happen via a series of walks, workshops, discussions, and screenings. The residency will commence on April 16th and end on the 30th.