Curiosity about each other is what brings us together and what moves creativity, innovation, and joy. “The Performers are Present…” turns curiosity into a visual genre, as it follows London-based performers into the details of their craft and the relationship they each have with the city. A series of portraits and short interviews, this story looks at dancers, actors, comedians, singers, and poets, to bring forth the passion, resilience, hard work, and determination of these young artists.
At the same time, the team behind this story calls for a rethinking of the visual genre of portraiture and invite the viewer to think beyond frames and narratives. The story has no beginning or end, it cannot be fully captured: the life of artists is in their every piece, in every movement, in successes and failures, in fear and moments of absolute pride and happiness. A portrait of the artist is an impossible task: presence, movement, emotion, desire – as elusive as the moment of creation itself. Nevertheless, this slice-of-life story offers just enough, holding back elements of the story, thus managing a hard task – to intrigue, tease, and move the viewer to find out more.
A short interview with Ali Bakht Al Tamimi, founder of a human development organisation based in Baghdad, Iraq. The project explores the different definitions of minorities as well as the possible solutions to the discrimination they face. The concept relies on a balance between four key pillars, individuality, affiliation, citizenship and global identity.
(Work in progress)
The city of Basra is the capital of the Basra province in Southern Iraq. Bordering Iran (east) and Kuwait (south), Its landscape varies from an oil and gas rich desert to fertile lands, home to the famous date palms. Basra is the only Iraqi region with ports to the Arabian/Persian Gulf, making it commercially active. In the absence of Saddam’s strict Baath regime of 2003, many families from surrounding areas have and still are migrating to Basra in hope of finding work.
If home were a body, what would yours look like? Born to a Jamaican mother and Nigerian father, Lola Oseni’s poem ‘Dami-Lola’ looks at what it feels like to be displaced in the place you’ve grown up calling home. Filmed and edited by Yassin Yassin and Jordan Katz-Kaye, ‘Dami-Lola’ reimagines what it means to be home.
The project was part of my effort to understand what had become of the country I'd left behind. Meet the Popular Mobilisation Forces (The Hash Al Shaabi) who fought IS in Iraq. These armed groups fought alongside the official security forces of Iraq when they were mobilised in 2014, a time when the Iraqi military proved to be weak and lost two major cities within the space of a couple of days to IS. The majority of the soldiers in these groups are Iraqi civilians with minimal arms training.
