Elias Sime: Eregata እርጋታ

 

Elias Sime (born in 1968 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) has exhibited extensively around the world.

Arnolfini opens its autumn season for 2023 with Eregata እርጋታ , the first major solo European museum exhibition of one of Ethiopia’s leading contemporary artists, Elias Sime, introducing audiences to a man and maker of extraordinary craftsmanship and collaborative spirit.

Recently the focus of a major touring exhibition in North America, and a prominent artist in the Venice Biennale 59th international exhibition, Sime’s approach to both life and art feels vital in the present moment.

Eregata እርጋታ will primarily focus on work from the past six years, including Sime’s monumental Venice Biennale commission Veiled Whispers (2022), alongside intricately woven abstract topographies from the landmark series Tightrope (2009 to present), key works from his early stitch, yarn and button series, and the tactile fragility of Bareness, a large-scale ceramic installation from 2014.

The exhibition’s title Eregata’s እርጋታ emerges from the artist’s language, Amharic, translated by Sime into as closest in meaning to the calmness and tranquility of the English word serene. Yet, for all its suggestions of calm to a western ear, for Sime eregata reflects a recognition that our minds are never truly still or silent: “we struggle to stop and sleep because our brains are constantly stimulated by technology – we are constantly moving faster not slower.”

Sime’s work flows against this tide, embracing a notion of ‘slowness’ – “My art is slowing it down. The work forces me to slow down.” – as he takes years to transform carefully sourced materials (from electrical wires to computer keyboards), filling them with new life, to explore both local and global issues around sustainability, materiality, and the impact of technology upon society.

Eregata እርጋታ also seeks to explore Sime’s relationship to his own environment, and the inspirational collaborative project Zoma Museum, in the artist’s home city of Addis Ababa, founded by Sime and long-time collaborator and anthropologist Meskerem Assegued.

A programme of performance, talks and screenings will accompany Eregata እርጋታ,  as well as workshops and family activities.

The exhibition will be complemented by a new publication Elias Sime: Eregata እርጋታ , featuring commissioned essays by curator Andria Hickey, Chief Curator The Shed, New York, and architect Nana Biamah-Ofosu, exploring Sime’s work and Zoma Museum (co-founded by Sime and Meskerem Assegued in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia). The book will be available in October 2023 via the Arnolfini Bookshop.

Gaza, on day 14 of the war

 

Latest figures: 

More than 4,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, according to the latest update from the Palestinian health ministry. 

The ministry said that 4,137 people have lost their lives, while more than 13,000 people have been injured.

Here's a summary of what The Guardian knows so far today:

• • On aid:

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  • -The first aid delivery to the besieged Gaza Strip via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt should take place “in the next day or so”, the UN has said

  • -The UN has also warned that any escalation of military activities in the Gaza Strip would be “catastrophic” for people there

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• On war:

• -At least 18 people are reported to have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Greek Orthodox church compound in Gaza

• -The Palestinian health ministry says 13 people, including five children, were killed after an Israeli assault on the Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank

• -The Israeli military says it attacked more than 100 operational targets in the Gaza Strip overnight

• -Israel has evacuated its own communities near Gaza and Lebanon and announced plans to evacuate Kiryat Shmona, a town of more than 20,000 residents near the Lebanese border

• -Most European has joined countries advise their citizens against any travel to Lebanon and urged those still in the country “to leave Lebanon as soon as possible”

Algerians support Palestinians

 

Several thousand people rallied in Algiers and across the country on Thursday in support of the Palestinians and to denounce Israel's ongoing strikes in the Gaza Strip. 

They were the first rallies to be authorised since the pro-democracy Hirak protests ended in 2021, with marchers hitting the streets in anger over Israel's bombardment of Gaza which has so far killed over 3,700 people, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. 

Popular support

The bombing campaign comes in response to Hamas's bloody October 7 attacks that saw thousands of fighters infiltrate the border by air, land and sea. At least 1,400 people have been killed in Israel, the majority civilians, since the attack, according to authorities. 

"The people and the army are with you, Palestine!" shouted demonstrators as they marched towards Martyrs' Square in Algiers, holding banners with slogans reading: "No to the murder of children, women and civilians." 

The march came two days after a deadly strike on a Gaza hospital compound which Hamas says killed hundreds of people, blaming Israel. 

But Israel has said the carnage was caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket in a claim backed by US President Joe Biden. 

"It was good the government approved this march, we were about to explode with rage watching the daily bombardment of Gaza," said Sarah Omari, a 22-year-old student at the University of Algiers. 

"We couldn't stop crying and shouting in the face of a world that allows Israel's crimes," she said. Throughout the capital, Palestinian flags were flying everywhere alongside Algerian flags, with the march there and in other locations across the country broadcast on public and private television channels. 

Traditionally a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, Algeria has cancelled all cultural events in a show of solidarity with Gaza, including the annual festivities of November 1 when it marks the outbreak of the 1954-1962 Algerian war for independence. 

It has also suspended all football matches "until further notice".

And political support

Algeria's foreign minister Ahmed Attaf on Tuesday also called on the international community to support the Palestinians, with whom he said Algeria stood in full solidarity as the Israel-Hamas war intensifies.

Speaking at the 20th session of the ministerial meeting of African and Nordic countries in Algiers, Attaf said "Our brothers in the Gaza Strip are living in deplorable humanitarian conditions." 

He said Algeria "calls on the international community to take urgent action to come to the aid of the oppressed and persecuted, to put an end to this aggression and to relaunch the peace process." 

The meeting of African and Nordic ministers is taking place from October 16 to 18, under the theme of "strengthening dialogue based on common values".

On Monday, Algeria's Supreme Security Council issued a statement stressing "its rejection of the occupation operations against defenceless civilians" and emphasised its solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

They added their conviction that"the radical solution does not lie in genocide or forced displacement, but rather in establishing the Palestinian state." 

Spreading to the rest of North Africa

The conflict between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas has triggered a wave of pro-Palestinian solidarity across North African countries, with demonstrations not only in Algeria but in Libya and Morocco.

Morocco officially recognised Israel in 2020, but blamed Israel for the strike on a hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds, as did Egypt, which became the first Arab country to normalise relations with Israel in 1979.

Gaza - follow up

 

Horrible situation regarding the impossibility of aid.

The Guardian reports:

Rafah crossing not expected to open Friday - report

The Rafah crossing is not expected to open Friday for a convoy of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, CNN reported, citing multiple sources.

“I would not put money on those trucks going through tomorrow,” one source told the news outlet.

Egyptian state media earlier reported that the Rafah crossing with Egypt would be opened tomorrow to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. It comes after Israel, the White House and Egypt confirmed that limited aid will be allowed to travel into Gaza through the crossing.

The source told CNN that the situation is “really volatile” and that there are a lot of other details to make sure the aid is sustained, not a one off. They said:

These people have been waiting for food, for medicine and for water. If they’re told 20 trucks are coming in and we don’t know when is next it’s going to create a really dangerous situation. If I were in that situation, if I didn’t think there would be more trucks, I’d do everything I could to get what’s inside.

US officials now expect the first convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian aid will cross into Gaza from Egypt this weekend, possibly Saturday, the report says.

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Here’s more on the reports that the Rafah crossing may not open tomorrow for humanitarian aid to get to the Gaza Strip, despite earlier reports that Egypt was preparing to open its side of the crossing on Friday morning.

Amichai Stein of Kann News writes:

Cancellation of events due to the war in Gaza

A message from the event organiser regarding Another Sky (Tomorrow):

We regret to announce that we need to postpone Another Sky. 

Owing to the number of the performers personally affected by the situation in Gaza, we cannot go ahead at this time.

MUSIC

Another Sky

20 October 2023, 20:00 - 22:30
Doors from 8pm for 8:15 start.

Another Sky is a touring festival of experimental music from the SWANA (South West Asia & North Africa) region and diaspora, including incredible pieces of improv, ambient soundscapes, compositions for western and non-western instruments, DJs, moving-image works, voice and machine-learning technologies. 

Blurring genres and categories, Another Sky celebrates the breadth of talent and ideas of SWANA/diaspora artists.

For Arnolfini, the line up includes: Wire Recorder Piece, Halim El-Dabh (1921-2017) The Egyptian-American who beat musique concrète to it. El-Dabh’s Expressions of Zaar premiered in Cairo in 1944, substantially pre-dating Pierre Schaeffer’s earliest musique concrète works. 

Another Sky will present a diffusion of Wire Recorder Piece, the surviving fragment of Expressions of Zaar, which utilises samples of female voices chanting during a zaar (a healing or exorcism).

Also work by:

FRKTL is the solo experimental music project of British-Egyptian artist and composer Sarah Badr. A classically trained multi-instrumentalist working with live sampling, improvisation, vocal manipulation, generative processes and field recordings, she creates emotive, immersive explorations of sound. Building systems for 3D graphics and spatial audio generation, she explores relationships between form and space in new tech domains. Her work is inspired and informed by nature, from world creation and biomorphic design, to simulations of complex organic phenomena. Her critically acclaimed album, Excision After Love Collapses, marks nearly a decade of independent, self-published works. She is an Oram Award recipient for innovation in sound, music and related technologies.

Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer whose practice explores an intersectional approach to postcolonial, queer, feminist, critical psychiatry and disability issues. Their work looks at the relation of the personal to (and as) political, individual and collective anxieties, and how alliances can be formed where different kinds of inequality and marginalisation intersect. They relate personal experiences of being queer, non-binary and part of the SWANA diaspora to wider forms of structural violence. From lived experience of psychiatric conditions and trauma (or PTSD), they began to explore the history of biomedical technologies in relation to state and military surveillance and control.

Hardi Kurda is a composer, sound artist, improviser, researcher and curator. He works with classical acoustic and electronic music, radio and found scores, and develops pieces in which music interacts with different art forms in art spaces to create new listening experiences. He composed 24/7 Everywhere for the Listening Biennial Slemani, part of the Global Listening Biennial collaboration with SPACE21, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where he is a founder and curator for sound art and experimental music. He is a scholarship holder at the Radio Art Residency in Halle (DE), where he created two experimental radio performances based on his illegal journey to Europe which revolve around the construction of legality.

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist, writer and performer. She previously led experimental arts project TOPH (The Old Police House), Tusk Fringe and Tusk North, and is Artistic Director of Tusk Festival, all based in Newcastle and Gateshead. She has been awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards For Artists in recognition of her contribution to music composition. Recent projects include a new live work made with Maria Chavez and Victoria Shen, fellow radical artists in the new turntablism, commissioned by Counterflows and Rewire festivals; Veil, a collaboration with Stephen Bishop released on Tusk Editions/Opal Tapes; SISTER with soprano Alya Al-Sultani; This World Which Is Made Of Women for BBC Radio 3 and SADTITZZZ for London Contemporary Music Festival.

Salam Shamki is a London-based multidisciplinary artist who is driven by story and documentation. She works as a freelance filmmaker, artist and arts facilitator, and will soon launch Heartnouveaux, an alternative jewellery and crochet boutique. Her practice is inspired by her cultural identity as a British Iraqi as she seeks to create works that identify and interrogate British and Iraqi culture through a postcolonial lens—as in her to-be-released project “Do I need the National Gallery?”Focusing on Iraqi culture and arts, she uses both fiction and documentary film—both live action and animation—to ask questions and archive pasts and presents.

Zeynep Ağcabay was born and raised in Istanbul, and their music explores the juxtaposition of Eastern and Western influences on their identity. Growing up with traditional Turkish music playing at home, Zeynep went on to discover new roots in London. Their experimental approach aims to discover a unique blend of these two sonic worlds by composing unusual structures of abstract percussions, ambiguous vocals and ambient soundscapes, mixed with sounds inspired by the Turkish ney, kanun, davul and darbuka.

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Another Sky is co-directed by Sam Salem (composer; co-founder Distractfold Ensemble; RNCM) and Emily Moore (Southern Bird artist management & production; former co-director Kammer Klang).

Funders: Arts Council England, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, PRS for Music Foundation, The Marchus Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation.

Partners: Arnolfini, Counterflows Festival, Cyborg Soloists, Ensemble Contrechamps, Irtijal Festival, The Mosaic Rooms, Royal Northern College of Music, Safar Film Festival, Space21 Festival.

The festival launches Another Sky as a long-term artist development network, this year platforming artists who live in or whose heritage spans Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Türkiye.

Worrying words from Netanyahu

 

The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has met Israel’s president and prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu on a visit to the country.

Here is what Netanyahu had to say...

Sunak and Netanyahu have given a short press conference, the Guardian reported on their live feed. 

And shared some of the key quotes and lines.

Netanyahu framed the conflict as a showdown between good and evil, modernity and barbarism, saying that both Israel and the world were facing their “darkest hour”.

He said:

This is a battle of Western civilisation, the battle of the free world, the battle for the future. We have here two forces. One is an axis of evil, led by Iran through Hezbollah, Hamas and others, that want to bring back the Middle East to the Middle Ages, to an age of bondage and war and slavery and annihilation. 

And the other forces – the forces of progress and humanity – that want to push the Middle East into a world of peace and prosperity. We’re on the cusp of expanding that peace – and destroying that move was one of the reasons why this action was taken. We have to resist it and we have to win. Above all, we have to win. We have to release the hostages.

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He can be heard here:

Rishi Sunak meets Israeli PM
Benjamin Netanyahu – watch live

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The Israeli PM also said the war would be long, adding that although there would be “ups and downs”, the people of Israel had never been more united.

He described Hamas and its allies as “the modern barbarians; the worst monsters on the planet”.

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Sunak said Israel had gone through something that “no country; no people should have to endure – least of all Israel”.

He also said that the UK supported Israel’s right to defend itself “in line with international law”, to go after Hamas and to bring back the hostages.

In a reference to concerns over Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks, Sunak added:

Now I know that you are taking every precaution to avoid harming civilians, in direct contrast to the terrorists of Hamas, which seem to put civilians in harm’s way.

The British PM thanked Netanyahu for his support for British nationals “caught up in this horror”, including the hostages.

Sunak referred to Tuesday’s blast at the al-Ahli Arab hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip but did not speculate as to who may have been responsible for it. 

He said:

We’ve seen scenes over the past day that have shocked all of us, particularly in the hospital and we mourn the loss of every innocent life.

Sunak also thanked the Israeli government for its decision to announce the opening up of humanitarian routes into Gaza.

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Screenshot from the live feed:

Gaza/Israel - 18 October 2023

 

2000+ artists calling for Gaza ceasefire

 

Tilda Swinton among 2000+ artists calling for Gaza ceasefire

October 17, 2023

• They accuse governments of “aiding and abetting” Israel’s “war crimes” in Gaza

• Palestinians face “collective punishment on an unimaginable scale”

• Governments should “end their military and political support for Israel’s actions”

Renowned actors Tilda Swinton, Charles Dance, Steve Coogan, Miriam Margolyes, Peter Mullan, Maxine Peake and Khalid Abdalla are among more than two thousand  people from across the arts who have signed a letter saying that: “Our governments are not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them.”

The artists, including Robert Del Naja and playwrights Tanika Gupta and Abbie Spallen, condemn “every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them”.

Citing Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant’s depiction of Palestinians as “human animals”, directors Michael Winterbottom, Mike Leigh and Asif Kapadia, comedians Frankie Boyle and Josie Long, authors Marina Warner, Jacqueline Rose, Gillian Slovo and Courttia Newland, and poet Anthony Anaxagorou, say Palestinians “have become people to whom almost anything can be done”. The minister had made the comments while announcing Israel’s “complete siege”, and halting supply of water, power, food and medicine to 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

Visual artists Tai Shani and Oreet Ashery, Larissa Sansour, Rosalind Nashashibi, P. Staff,  Florence Peake and Georgina Starr say that, in Gaza, “Palestinians whose grandparents were forced out of their homes at the barrel of a gun [in 1948] are again being told to flee – or face collective punishment on an unimaginable scale.”

The signatories include producers, curators, writers, DJs, architects and designers who support the “global movement against the destruction of Gaza and the mass displacement of the Palestinian people”. They cite the UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths, who has said that ‘the spectre of death’ is hanging over Gaza, and call for “an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered”.

THE LETTER IN FULL:

“We are witnessing a crime and a catastrophe. Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble, and cut off the supply of water, power, food and medicine to 2.3 million Palestinians. In the words of the UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, ‘the spectre of death’ is hanging over the territory.

Gaza is already a society of refugees and the children of refugees. Now, in their hundreds of thousands, bombarded from air, sea and land, Palestinians whose grandparents were forced out of their homes at the barrel of a gun are again being told to flee – or face collective punishment on an unimaginable scale.  Dispossessed of rights, described by Israel’s minister of defence as “human animals”, they have become people to whom almost anything can be done.

Our governments are not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them. There will come a time when they are held to account for their complicity. But for now, while condemning every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them, our obligation is to do all we can to bring an end to the unprecedented cruelty being inflicted on Gaza.

We support the global movement against the destruction of Gaza and the mass displacement of the Palestinian people. We demand that our governments end their military and political support for Israel’s actions.

We call for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered.”