Past Event
Access requirements
Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making all of our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please contact access@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
Information about access on site at the gallery is available here https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit/access/
This includes information about Lift access; Borrowing wheelchairs & seating; Assistance Animals; Parking; Toilets and baby care facilities; Blind & Partially Sighted Visitors; Subtitles and transcripts; British Sign Language (BSL) and hearing induction loops; Deaf Messaging Service (DMS).
About This Event
This event takes place in Gallery 2 at Whitechapel Gallery, located on the ground floor
This event lasts approximately 3 hours. Attendees are encouraged to take as many breaks as they need during the event.
You must book a ticket to attend the event.
If the ticket price affects your attendance, please email tickets@whitechapelgallery.org to be added to the guest list (no questions asked, but dependent on availability).
This event is suitable for those over the age of 16
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event
We are unable to provide live closed captioning or CART for this event.
An audio recording of the event can be obtained by emailing publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org following the event.
Transport
To the best of our knowledge, there are no planned disruptions to local transport on the date of the event.
Our nearest train station – Aldgate East Underground (1 min) is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are Whitechapel (15 min), Shoreditch High Street (15 min) or Liverpool Street (15 min).
Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis.
This event is now fully booked. Please contact infodesk@whitechapelgallery.org or call +44 (0)20 7522 7888 to be added to the waitlist.
Come, let us soar beyond the moon… is an evening curated by Baesianz responding to pioneering artist Hamad Butt (1962-1994) and his retrospective Apprehensions at Whitechapel Gallery, taking the dream-like visual poetry of Pakeezah (1972)—a Bollywood film that featured heavily in Butt’s psyche—as Baesianz‘ starting point.
Tracing the dance between danger and desire found within Apprehensions and the epic musical drama Pakeezah, the evening will feature a specially commissioned live performance by artist Sami El-Enany and a programme of short films, untangling the poetics of risk, longing, and diasporic memory, and how bodies, histories, and collective energies often exist in tension.
Small, complementary cinema snacks will be provided by Nitesh Tailor.
Films:
This event accompanies our current exhibition Hamad Butt: Apprehensions.
Supported by the Centre for Public Engagement at Queen Mary University of London.
Kink Retrograde (2022) by Basyma Saad
Shot in 2019 in a sea-side landfill on the outskirts of Beirut, against a backdrop of environmental collapse and toxicity. In the original plot, intoxicated characters decide the social contract with sovereign powers has always been breached; they must devise a novel type of contract aware of its own abjectness, risk, and deviance—one of total kink. The remake revises and rehearses that call for a risk-aware kink.
Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020) by Suneil Sanzgiri
Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, the filmmaker traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins from his birth in 1989.
Mast-del (2023) by Maryam Tafakory
Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires, both inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Sami El-Enany is an artist who works with sound, fraying the edges of modern classical, electronica and found sound. His work includes multi-channel installation, electroacoustic composition, sound design, record production and image-sound collaboration. His score for the feature film Walking With Shadows was nominated for an Africa Movie Academy Award and his tone poem Creation of the Birds has received accolades from Grand Prix Nova, BBC Radio Awards and Phonurgia Nova.
As a musician and improvisor Sami is currently developing tape collage techniques as a tool for listening and reflection. The source material for the tapes are a scrapbook of exploratory recording sessions, off-cuts from film scores, and found sound spanning his travels as a field recordist. Sami narrates the tape collages with improvisations at the piano. Through his practice and research, Sami is delving into the sonics of solidarity, exploring sound as resonance for union.
Baesianz is a London-based interdisciplinary collective that cultivates Asian-led narratives from all over the globe, founded by Sami Kimberley, Sarah Khan and Roxanne Farahmand in 2019. Born from a shared need to nurture their Asian roots and uplift Asian artists and communities, the collective organises multidisciplinary events including exhibitions, film screenings, solidarity fundraisers, workshops, radio shows, artist residencies, and audio-visual performances. Now a team of seven, Baesianz curates and exhibits the art and voices of Asian heritage folk living both within and outside of Asia to create an evolving archive that can be experienced by all.
