MUD: The Urgency of the Arts | Special Guests Event with Ali Cherri and Sophie Seita

Presentation by Ali Cherri: Troubled Waters

Mud is neither land nor water, and yet it is also both. The imaginary around mud embodies this in-between state; a ground favourable not only for natural resources, but also for imagination, and since the myth of Adam, for creation. From the corrosive aspect to the creation myths, and using inundations and ods as a vehicle that deposits these muds, the presentation will be a journey into different stories around swamps, mud-lands and their fantasies.

Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Lebanon) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Paris. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, which resulted in the exhibition If you prick us, do we not bleed?. He is the winner of the Silver Lion Award for in the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale. His first feature film, The Dam, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2022.

https://www.alicherri.com/

https://www.instagram.com/ali.cherri/

Performance lecture by Sophie Seita: Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs)

This artist talk will look at and draw out language and look at this act of drawing out as an engagement with muddiness. Such a type of writing is sloppy, damp, cloudy, messy. It rejects purity and cleanliness in favour of the indirect, the wobbly, it revels in its own confusion and vagueness. As a proposition. A letter to the future. A form of reading. Sometimes muddiness occurs when sediments are stirred up; when the water experiences disturbance. Mud is a witness to disturbance. It gives shape to our ideas.We can thrive in it. Or we might get stuck. And then maybe this wrestling with viscosity, with mud’s nutrient-rich, impressionable body which holds other bodies, asks us: what do we do with this? What can this language of doing or not-doing accomplish ?

Sophie Seita is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores text in its various translations into book objects, performances, videos, or other languages and embodiments. She’s performed and shown work at Café Oto, [ SPACE ], Hoxton253, the Royal Academy, the Drawing School, the Cockpit Theatre, Art Night 2018 and 2019, Raven Row, Bold Tendencies, the Serpentine, Parasol Unit (all London), Taller Bloc (Santiago, Chile), SAAS-Fee Summer Institute of Art (Berlin), the Arnolfini (Bristol), Company Gallery, Issue Project, Printed Matter, and La MaMa Galleria (all NYC), the Flemish Arts Centre De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), JNU (New Delhi, India), Taller Bloc (Santiago, Chile), New Hall Art Collection, Kettle’s Yard (both Cambridge), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and elsewhere. Her recent publications include: a book of experimental performance writing, My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar, 2020), a book of criticism, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford University Press, 2019), a performance script The Gracious Ones (Earthbound Press, 2020), a book of lyric essays Lessons of Decal (87Press, 2023, forthcoming), and translations of Uljana Wolf work, Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017) and Etymological Gossip: Essays and Lectures (Nightboat Books, 2023, forthcoming), as well as art writing in Flesh Arranges Itself Differently (Roberts Institute of Art/Hunterian, 2022) and ON FIGURE/S (Ma Bibliothèque, 2021). In 2022, she was the Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence at FU Berlin; and in April 2023, she will be the Artist in Residence at Brown University.

https://www.sophieseita.com/

https://www.instagram.com/sophieseita/