performance installations

The wall
Soap Factory: [Rethinking Public Spaces]

August 2017 - performance installation located in Prospect Park Community Garden

THE WALL cut through the garden, split the land and blocked our eyes. In a 3 week public installation + performance created by Leila Awadallah and Lamia Abukhadra in collaboration with Martin Gonzales; THE WALL was a visually transforming border wall with interactive community engagement events and performances.

Week 1: Local performances of various mediums by artists of color who responded to the wall.

Week 2: Community paint day. Transform the wall with stencils, graffiti.

Week 3: Destruction day. Community invited to destroy wall together.

my garden is a security threat

Curated by Essma Imady: "Who can art speak for? To investigate the question of representation, artists in Minnesota will be connected with artists in countries that cannot receive visas under the current administration. They will be asked to create a piece based on their conversation and interaction with the artist, an art piece created “by proxy”. Can the work by the local artist speak for the artist abroad? Will it only speak for the artist who initiated the piece? Or will the meaning of the work be determined by the audience, thus making the audience the final artist by proxy?"

Leila Awadallah will perform My Garden is a Security Threat in collaboration with Asma Ghanem [Shams Asma]. In a durational, 4 hour improvisational movement meditation + accompanied by detaching and reattaching audio, we are exploring how different sonic pairings change our witnessing of the moving, mourning, resistant, and celebrating Palestinian body. How do we witness / how is our seeing altered by the lens of all of this noise?

The mobility and immobility of Palestinian bodies is a slow suffocation, swallowing indigenous lands daily. To carry out peaceful, every day life activities, (like picking sage on the road side) may be deemed a security threat depending where you are. Security threats are justifiable cause for confiscating land and imprisonment. 

This work is woven by Leila and Asma's different experiences and explorations, as well as the daily stories of the lives of Palestinians that are rarely heard

Performed: Walker Art Center - August 2017

this is rael

Soap Factory: 3x5 Residency

Collaboration with Lamia Abukhadra // Sound by Alex Leeds and Alex Adkinson // Costuming by Megan Fox

Installation + 4 hr durational performance in Soap Factory exhibition opening

Cut the land up with your blood red lines
Cut the sky up with your blood red lines
Violence doesn't hide, it is everywhere
We see it
It circles us
It wants to believe that it is everything
It wants to hold us so tightly that it breaks us

But we know the secret
We know how to readjust our eyes
We see through blood red lines
We see our people
Surviving because we refuse to stop dreaming
We see our land
It whispers, it screams, and sings
Memories of life, to remind us
That
Uprooted flowers preserve their shape, their color
They refuse to crumple, wilt, break
Their color will not fade

This is real
This is happening
We will continue, to move, to resist, to dance
These blood red lines try to intimidate us
But when we readjust our eyes
They are string.
And our bodies have been sharpened
Through the histories of our ancestors
Our stories
Our voices
Our bodies
Are the weapons we need.

Leila Awadallah