A breathing space interlacing Lucas Odahara’s “Lingual” sculptures and tongues with The Many Headed Hydra’s “Rituals” soft architecture by Emma Wolf Haugh
Works and offerings by Arshia Fatima Haq/Discostan, Aziza Ahmad, Aziz Sohail, District*School Without Center, Emma Wolf Haugh, Fiza Khatri, Lucas Odahara, Nuray Demir, Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh, Shahana Rajani & Zahra Malkani, SS Beben & Promona Sengupta, Suza Husse, The Many Headed Hydra, Vassiliea Stylianidou aka Franck-Lee Alli-Tis, Venuri Perera, Vicky Shahjahan, friends and guests.
They threw a bomb here, a monstrous man-made creation which is meant to spare nothing alive. But the earth is harder to extinguish than that, and even this dead landscape did not remain as eternally dead as they intended. For one there were the ghost animals, and then, when you multiply hundreds of sun cycles with nutrient-rich waste, the soil ferments and doesn’t take long to become a living thing again. So when the womxn landed here, they did not find a barren world at all, but a thriving ecosystem, cities of forests with unimaginable plants, animals with translucent bodies sprinting about, colours they had not seen before. We knew we would settle here because it was ruin that gave us freedom, and ruin we would rebuild our lives upon. The first womxn did not want us to forget where we came from, so rooted us in a place which would remind us what violence can cost, why we must never forget our dharma.
Sadia Khatri, The City of Mitre, unpublished manuscript, 2019
Inspired by Sadia Khatri’s science fiction story The City of Mitre which appears in the first kal publication RITUALS, tidal KoHabitat for postpatriarchal futures emerges as an amorphous, de-institutionalised, organically growing/shrinking space for visual, narrative and performative contaminations, for collective learning, speculating, working and for hanging out. The trans*oceanic KoHabitat is dedicated to situated knowledge production about forms of life and community, relations, languages, rituals, symbols, stories and spiritualities which take shape in the ruins left by colonialism, patriarchy, phantasies of human exceptionalism and capitalism.
29 July, from 6 pm celebration ceremony for Tidal KoHabitat for Post-Patriarchal Futures
with works and offerings by Arshia Fatima Haq/Discostan, Fiza Khatri, Lucas Odahara, Nuray Demir, Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh, Shahana Rajani & Zahra Malkani, SS Beben & Promona Sengupta, The Many Headed Hydra, Vassiliea Stylianidou, Venuri Perera, Vicky Shahjahan and guests.
29 July, 7 pm queer politics of crossing and liquifying time and space
Promona Sengupta, Vassiliea Stylianidou aka Franck-Lee Alli-Tis and Venuri Perera in conversation
moderated by Aziz Sohail & Suza Husse of The Many Headed Hydra
How may we disrupt linear notions of time and space and imagine, make and inhabit new queer pasts and futures? Join us as we discuss perspectives with artists who have been engaging with these ideas within our project especially through ideas of performance and drag, ritual making and deep listening to planetary ecologies.
5 August, 7 pm temporary community as decolonial practice
Arshia Fatima Haq of Discostan, Lucas Odahara, The Many Headed Hydra
moderated by Aziz Sohail
Collective making is one of the central impulses of kal. In a patriarchal and capitalist world that values individual practice, we believe in fostering community building and working across and with relationships formed slowly and overtime. This conversation brings together the practices of Arshia Fatima Haq, Lucas Odahara and The Many Headed Hydra, who each utilise building infrastructures for coming together within and as an inherent part of their practice.
11 August, 6 pm – 7 pm Artist talk with Mahmoud Khaled
(note: this talk will take place online via Zoom)
As part of the summer collective reading practice ‘the archive is not a thing of the past, it is a promise for the future’ with the residents of House of Kal Karachi and Colombo being co-led by Vera Ryser and Aziz Sohail, artist Mahmoud Khaled will be giving a talk on his practice engaging with queer identity through objects that inform it and an amassed knowledge: articles of desire, spatial gestures, and simulated conversations. Khaled’s work complicates and appropriates form to offer virtual proposals that rethink justice and imagine possibilities for a redemptive future.
Performances
10 August, 6 pm – 7.30 pm Speculative Roadside Maduwa Ninja Kesel Fame Bitches Alphabet (working title)
A Performance in Public Space by Nuray Demir and Venuri Perera
(location will be communicated 3 days prior to the performance on the District website)
kal is temporal glitch, a sphere of remixing, for “creating new “records” through radical action” (Legacy Russel). In their site responsive collaborative performance, Venuri Perera and Nuray Demir remix queer feminist technologies of honouring and (re)inscribing the battles and works feminist ghosts and ancestors, of navigating and claiming public spaces dominated by patriarchal, racist and class boundaries, speculative myth making and neo-ritualistic practices of resistance.
10 August, 8 pm Sama: The Divine Listening Room
Performance & installation by Arshia Fatima Haq with Raed Yassin
Sama: The Divine Listening Room is an ongoing series of installations by Arshia Fatima Haq evoking the communal, immersive atmospheres of deep listening in Sufi dargahs, or shrines. Through visuals, music, and textural elements, and with different collaborators Arshia Fatima Haq constructs visual and sound narratives to create a time-based and sensory experience of current political and devotional leitmotifs in the SWANA region (South and West Asia and North Africa). In the House of Kal’s iteration of Sama, she is joined by artist Raed Yassin; together, they perform an experimental sound and visual piece in the form of a call and response.
21 June – 2 August Rituals for Coastal Commons
Collaborative DIY video zine workshop with The Many Headed Hydra
Low fi video making poetics, performative intervention and experimental writing. Incorporating ritual as a practice of resistance, political imagination and the unruly unfolding of time we work with sites where property development, extractive industries and militarization encroach on access to bodies of water that should be public / multi species commons.
8 – 11 July radio kal hosts: SoundSysters’ Level 1 PA – Live Mixing Workshops
by and for FLINT* (women, lesbians, intersex, non binary and trans*) people
You will learn how to set up a small PA, use different mixers and other sound equipment, soundcheck, set up monitor speakers, and some basic theory on electricity.
11 and 13 July Space Debris and Shrine Capsule Sculpting
Worldbuilding workshop on Spaceship Beben with Kosmik Skulptress Kallia, Captain Pro and Nav Chief Hydra
A shapeshifting, semi-organic ship time-travelling through unknown coordinates, the Beben is co-created by queer feminist makers, activists, artists and curators from Berlin and beyond for purposes of artistic empowerment, rest and joy. During this session, the Beben crew will conduct a water body attunement workshop for new cosmonaut recruits, and a carrier-bag and shrine making workshop with Kallia Kefala to house the Beben archives on Earth.
3 – 5 August, 12 am – 3 pm radio kal TOOLING#3: Relational Listening Composing Workshop
with A Frei
The 3-day online workshop focuses on collaborative practices of listening-composing and situated, embodied and queer modes of listening and sounding. Connecting participants in and beyond Karachi, Colombo and Berlin, the workshop aims to experiment with relationality beyond linear notions of time, attunement toward difference and simultaneity of place and shared sonic fields as a propositions for conviviality beyond language. The collective composition will be published as part of the radio kal series later this year.
