Rumbles from
the Gut
Rumbles from the gut
Curated by Goldsmiths MFA curating students Elisha Fall and Priscilla Lo
13 June - 10 August 2024
Rumbles from the gut is a series of sonic and food happenings devised in response to the alternative archiving practices of the WANAWAL. Spanning across the exhibition period of don't worry i won't forget you, it highlights sound and food as a resistant medium to activate embodied knowledge. It welcomes artists and audiences to stir, spew and digest the archive, challenging themes of silence and sterility conventionally associated with the space, along with its long history in colonialism.
Phase 1 - Sow
At the opening of the exhibition on 13 June 2024, the series commences with an installation in the Peveril Gardens by artist Alia Hamaoui based on her ongoing “qabqab” research into the historical pair of women's bathhouse clogs worn across WANA. By enlarging the qabqab into a bench, she imagines a platform in which a myriad of narratives on WANA women germinates. It doubles as a slowly growing plant bed in which seeds of sage and black cumin have sowed to be harvested in the closing event of the exhibition, suggesting alternative archiving practices revolving around care, preparation and oral histories.
Throughout the making of the project, Rumbles from the gut curators Elisha Fall and Priscilla Lo have been gathering materials alongside artistsAlia Hamaoui, Riwa Saab and Bint Mbareh compiled into an accompanying booklet series Phase 1 - Sow & Phase 2 - Harvest. These materials include essays, visuals, recipes and documentation relating to the research touched upon in the project, such as themes of resistance, alternative archiving, and bodily knowledge.
A booklet formed collaboratively through conversation by Alia Hamaoui, Priscilla Lo and Elisha Fall, accompanies the installation at FormaHQ and can be picked up for free in Peveril Gardens or in Presse Books. The full PDF can be found here.
Phase 2 - Harvest
On Saturday 10 August 2024, the exhibition will be open for the last time with the final happenings of the public programme, including the project Rumbles from the gut devised by Priscilla lo and Elisha Fall.
The day will start with a reading group working with don't worry i won't forget you curators Êvar and Sarah Hamed, alongside Rumbles from the Gut curators Elisha and Priscilla, as well as exhibiting artist Shamiran Istifan. Join us for a relaxed session sitting in where we will spend time exploring selected texts from the WANAWAL. This is a space to spew, digest and voice the archive and related works. Following two months of growing in Peveril Gardens, artists Alia Hamaoui, Riwa Saab and Bint Mbareh will collaboratively harvest and activate the “qabqab” installation, recalling practices of oral history and embodied knowledge. Then, a workshop conducted by archivist Êvar Hussayni on the origins of WANAWAL will exploring archival boxes and reading materials, and engaging in an informal discussion to create a collaborative reading list and scan resources to take home.We will end the day with a screening of Life on the CAPS, Meriem Bennani’s highly acclaimed science-fiction trilogy.
Full information on the programme and tickets can be found here.
Biographies
Elisha Fall is an independent curator and organiser living and working in London, currently studying for her MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. Co-Founder of Finger Food, a South East London-based Queer Food Arts Collective. Her practice focuses on expanded notions of queer curating and knowledge exchange through programming and exhibition-making. Her current research is exploring queer culture and community arts practices through the queering of space and exploring food-based practices, and has priorly explored different forms of kinship, queer bodies, interdisciplinary connection, and care structures.
Priscilla Lo is an independent curator, currently pursuing an MFA in Curating with Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice spans exhibition-making, programming, facilitation and writing, with a focus on fostering processes and interdisciplinary exchanges. Her recent research explores the history of colonial botany and how it intersects with politics of land, race and gender. She engages with narratives and bodily knowledge as resistant forms, enabling entangled relations between human and more-than-human beings. Her projects have been selected by and presented across institutions in London, including CCA Goldsmiths (2023) and Chisenhale Studios (2023).
Alia Hamaoui is a British/Lebanese artist living and working in London, UK. Hamaoui completed her undergraduate studies at Camberwell College of Arts and is currently studying for an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘HINO 500’ at San Mei Gallery (London, 2023) and ‘Passing Pari-daiza’ at Soup Gallery (London, 2023). Alongside, Hamaoui has exhibited widely in London, as well as internationally in Lisbon and Warsaw. Hamaoui’s multidisciplinary practice explores the proximate relationship of humanity and heritage. Hamaoui aims to advance our understanding of the interrelationship between cultural identity, the object and place, as viewed from within our increasingly digitised society and tech-infused existence. Particularly interested in specific cultural artefacts that have been co-opted or utilised by the cultural industry in shaping broader narratives of regional or national identity. (typically in relation to our understanding of the SWANA). Hamaoui’s work combines ancient objects, architectural locations, and mass media moments into materially rich sculptural amalgamations that fold the body, heritage and space into abstracted entanglements. Often utilising tricks of haptic allure, Hamaoui’s interested in the tantalisation of the senses as a mechanism to question the gaze and audience participation in how to re-contextualise, castrate or reframe the cultural artefact.
Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher with a curiosity about the superpowers of communal singing. Her initiation into music came through her research on rain-summoning in Palestine. She conducted research initially to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. She learned that the songs that helped communities summon and harness rain, at their core helped people build a relationship with their environment, decide what time of year it is, communally determine how to share resources fairly, and that when used in current life, these uses could still be evoked, rather than remembered. She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary upheavals, still looking for these significations in Palestinian landscape, especially the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), the prophet Moses.
Riwa Saab is a cross-disciplinary artist who works with space, sound, and words. Through braiding together the crafts of theatre, poetry, and music, she interrogates how art puts people and our relationships at the centre of the political narratives we inhabit, while particularly exploring the diasporic experience of building cultural bridges, unpacking generational and familial baggage, and creating space for pockets of joy. Her work comprises performance, sound design, directing, producing, and facilitating.