Past Event
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About This Event
– This event takes place online only.
– You can access this event for free through this web page and also on the Whitechapel Gallery’s YouTube Channel, here.
– 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.
– As the event is scheduled for a total of one hour, we will not take a rest break.
– As the event is being live streamed, you can access it from your home if you have access to an internet connection.
– Event recordings can be found on our YouTube channel. Please contact info@whitechapelgallery.org with any questions.
This information will be updated where required.
25 June – 2 July 2021
Ahead of the live event on 1 July, On Akka’s Shore was screened for free here from 25 June – 2 July 2021.
Migration across water can come at great cost. Lebanese born artist Umama Hamido‘s essay film explores the chaos of memory in relation to personal and collective history; a meditation on a past, present, and future that has been continuously disrupted; from Palestine to Beirut to London. Here the water is both material and also a form of imagistic vessel, carrying a life, identity and belonging in flux. Hamido will be in conversation with Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
On Akka’s Shore is a fictional memoir of Umama and her friend Tareq Al Jazzar based on hallucinations, dreams and out-of-body experiences, scenes slip between Akka in Palestine, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hamido’s city of birth, Beirut and London, their current home. On Akka’s Shore takes us on an exploration of the chaos of memory in relation to personal and collective history.
“Yesterday I dreamt that I was flying over the streets of Beirut. I was my camera, my body and my eye and all of me was one with the lens. You asked me how it was. I told you, the feeling resembles everything in it. Do you think places get stuck in time when we leave them?” – Umama Hamido
On Akka’s Shore was supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Pacitti Company and Artsadmin.
This event is part of our season Ways of Knowing: Water / Fluidity.
Umama Hamido (b. 1987), born in Lebanon currently based in London, is an artist and filmmaker. Her work addresses lived and shared experiences of immigration through intersecting psychological, socio-political and judicial perspectives. From positions of marginalization and administrative limbo, she questions our relation to traumatic spaces, how the formation of the self is affected by separation from homeland and the exile’s gaze.
Umama Hamido has a BA in Theatre from the Lebanese University, and an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths University. She has performed at various galleries across the UK, including Turner Contemporary, Modern Art Oxford, Toynbee Studios, Mosaic Rooms, New Art Exchange, and at festivals including Otherfield Documentary Festival, SPILL Festival, Dublin Live Art Festival, Rencontres à l’Échelle Festival, and Arab Women Artist Now Festival. She also performs in collaborative projects of others and teaches and translates Arabic.
