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A SPACE TO IMAGINE A QUESTION OF DISTANCE

Hagit Bar-Fleming 

Art across the Middle East

 Susan Trangmar

6 performance/installation events and a poetry reading

 

May/June 2006

 

A SPACE TO IMAGINE A QUESTION OF DISTANCE creates a variety of interconnections:  between visual art, dance and poetry - sound, projected image, action and the spoken word - and between English, Israeli, Syrian and Iraqi intellects. These events have been curated by Anthony HowelI, organiser of The Room, a space for visual art, dance, performance art and poetry.  He has invited Susan Trangmar, a London based photo-visual artist who is also working in sound,  to create a new sound/slide installation for The Room, drawing on her conversations with people of all ethnic backgrounds in Israel and utilising photographs taken in conjunction with these conversations.  An initial version of this work in process, commissioned by Multi Exposure, has toured Israel as a live performance event, and last year she presented that work at the International Centre, Bethlehem.  Susan Trangmar is a visual artist of international repute who has shown extensively throughout Europe and in the Middle East. She is currently Research Fellow in Fine Art at Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Trangmar’s photographs emphasise visual and physical divisions, borders and fences while the conversations are emancipated from their sources of reference – that is, the “I and You” become universal – so that one cannot tell whether the speaker is of Jewish, Christian or Muslim origin.  Thus the visual images reassert the divisions removed in the text. In the piece for The Room – A Question of Distance – text and images are reworked as a sculpted orchestration of light utilising projection, darkness, the spoken word and silence.

Hagit Bar-Fleming, an Israeli dancer now living in the UK, has been invited to create a dance work – A Space to Imagine – for The Room.  Hagit Bar-Fleming is a choreographer who has performed at The Place in Resolution, at the Laban Centre, in Barcelona, Portugal and Israel, and she has conducted numerous seminars in dance.  She has been interested in the notion of occupation as it might be applied to a dancer’s actions, though of course the term can equally be applied to a territory.  Her work takes on strenuous repetitions that become arrested.  For this piece she creates a series of movement "snapshots" –  brief, concise episodes of physical expression.  Sometimes there is a sense of entrapment about her movements.
 
A Space to Imagine and A Question of Distance are shown consecutively within the same space with a short interval between (see programme details). This placing leaves a space open for interpretation. The works may ‘speak to one another’ and this could be taken as a metaphor for the encounter of strangers and what it might be possible or problematic for them to share.

The Room has delivered a number of successful poetry events as well as hosting visual art exhibitions, performance art and a variety of dance classes.  For this season of work from the Middle East, the Room will host a poetry reading that will feature Arab writers from the Middle East.  Readers include Fawzi Karim, foremost Iraqi poet and correspondent for the Arabic newspaper ASHARQ ALAWSAT.  Fawzi Karim has a wide knowledge of the work of Arab writers. Hilda Ismael, a brilliant young poet from Saudi Arabia, will also be reading, and Nadia Al Yafai, a writer of charming short stories dealing with the impact of a return to origins, who is of Syrian extraction.   In addition, Anthony Howell will read his own versions of the pre-Islamic Yemeni poet Imr al Kais – "The foremost of the poets," according to Mohammed, "and their leader into hell fire."

Fawzi Karim                  Helda Ismael
Fawzi Karim                                                             Hilda Ismael

A Space to Imagine a Question of Distance


Susan Trangmar/Hagit Bar-Fleming

Friday 26 May, Saturday 27 May, 3pm-9pm

(dance and installation programme at 7.30 pm)

Friday 2 June, Saturday 3 June 3pm-9pm

(dance and installation programme at 7.30 pm)

Friday 9 June, Saturday 10 June 3pm-9pm

(dance and installation programme at 7.30 pm)

Entry: £5/£3 concessions after  7 pm

 

POETRY at The Room: with Fawzi Karim and Hilda Ismail reading their own poetry in Arabic and in translation, Nadia Al Yafai reading a short story and Anthony Howell reading his versions of the pre-Islamic Arabic poet Imr Al Kais

7.30pm Wednesday 7th June, £5/£3 concessions

 

0208 808 9318

 

info-theroom@fsmail.net

 

www.the-room.org.uk

The Room

Concept - Anthony Howell and Jenny Sayer

33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS

Tottenham Hale, Victoria Line, Bruce Grove overland plus many buses to Tottenham


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