Through the Homebound Residency Programme, Rand Abdul Jabbar was able to continue to build on a project commissioned by the Shubbak Festival, which started as a participatory online workshop titled Memories of Home and engaged women of the Iraqi and Arab diaspora in London in dialogue and discourse around perceptions of identity as related to place, history and memory.The group engaged in individual and collective contemplation on the varied and often conflicting experiences of displacement and their reverberating impacts across multiple generations. The findings from the workshop led to the development of the work Every Act of Recognition Alters What Survives, a dynamic, episodic work consisting of a series of sculptural interventions, performances and a digital archive. During the residency, the artist developed the digital component of the work, which consolidated the project in a single locus.

 

Individual narratives encountered and extracted in the form of oral, written and visual recordings, as well as documentation of the sculptural interventions and performances, were organised according to the corresponding Acts, and placed in a digital archive that took the form of a website. Throughout the residency, Rand collaborated with Kathy Barber on the development of a website that would serve as a digital repository for the project.

 

 

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(Left to Right)

Act II: The Climbing Vine

Act III: The Garden Scene

Photography by Youcef Hadjazi. Courtesy of Shubbak Festival.

 

 

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Entissar Hajali in Act II: The Climbing Vine

Photography by Youcef Hadjazi. Courtesy of Shubbak Festival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Act I: Memories of Home

 

 

The website actsofrecognition.com is a digital repository for the interdisciplinary project Every Act of Recognition Alters What Survives. It features an in-depth look at the workshop process and documents the subsequent sculptural works and performance. Through audio recordings, translated transcripts, photography and text, it captures and allows for a multi-layered experience of the work to engage a wider audience online.

 

The website layout distinguishes the three acts by placing them on a page of their own, where Act I consists of two subpages: “Reflections on Memories of Home” and “Recordings”. “Reflections on Memories of Home” describes the workshop process, interspersed by sound and written recordings from the participants, while “Recordings” compiles the outcomes of the workshop including the narratives and objects each participant chose to document. Act II features four sculptural interventions with a specially written text and performance by Entissar Hajali, one of the original workshop members, in Act II specifically. Images, text, original audio and a translated transcript of Entissar’s performance are used to document these two Acts.

 

The website actsofrecognition.com is a digital repository for the interdisciplinary project Every Act of Recognition Alters What Survives, a dynamic, episodic work consisting of a series of sculptural interventions, performances and a digital archive.Commissioned by Shubbak Festival, and initiated as a participatory workshop titled Memories of Home, the project engaged women of the Iraqi and Arab diaspora in London in dialogue and discourse around perceptions of identity as related to place, history and memory. During the 2020 Homebound Residency, the artist collaborated with Kathy Barber to develop the digital component of the work, which would consolidate the Acts in a single locus. The website features an in-depth look at the workshop process and documents the subsequent sculptural works and performance through text interspersed by original sound and written recordings from the workshop participants, images and translated transcripts to allow for a multi-layered experience of the work and engage a wider audience online. Every Act of Recognition Alters What Survives evokes memory’s transportative power to defy boundaries of space and time and their capacity to connect with cherished experiences from distant times and places in the present moment.

 

 

ABOUT THE RESIDENT

Rand Abdul Jabbar (b. Baghdad, 1990) engages in a multi-disciplinary approach to creative output, oscillating across the threshold between design, architecture, and the visual arts. Throughout her process, she often borrows from and reconstructs the ephemera of place, history, and memory, employing design, sculpture and installation as primary mediums of operation. Current research pursuits examine remnants of historic, cultural and personal narratives surrounding Iraq. Abdul Jabbar interrogates the fragility of Iraq’s tangible heritage, creating and composing forms that draw on artifacts, architecture and mythology. Simultaneously, she explores and contests with personal and collective memory to produce fragmentary reassemblies of past experiences and inherited recollections. Abdul Jabbar received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in 2014.

 

 

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Every Act of recognition Alters What Survives

Website Recording