Performance | Our Queer future is a past tense – أجسَادٌ مِن عَلَق

To those Exiled from Earth, so they chose the sky 

('أجسَادٌ مِن عَلَق) Our Queer future is a past tense' is an installation performance in a form of a promenade, based on a post migration perspective on Queerness in relation to Arab* Identity(s). As a term, queerness does not exist in Arabic. However, it does and did exist as a practice, one that goes back further than the global queerness; that Western hegemony imposed on the globe. The language of queerness becomes hegemonic through erasing identities that existed before it and subsuming/substituting vast and complex communities, histories, and languages ​​across the globe with a monolithic, generalizing Western model of understanding and approaching sexual and gender diversity. Ahmad Baba will take the audience through a journey between different temporal and spatial dimensions of "queer" existence. : an invisible past, incorporating linguistic, social, cultural, and religious elements on erotic, sexual and "non-normative" discourses from classical Arab* manuscripts. Into a distorted present that challenges the hegemony of Western narratives about Arabo-Islamic sexual and gender identities, Towards imagining a utopic future that holds more questions than offer answers. “Ilk علق” is an attempt to engage with these questions! It is an investigation into how queerness has become a form of colonialism, erasing and homogenizing many identities and ways of being that do not necessarily fit under it as an umbrella term, but are nonetheless drawn to it due to the lack of taxonomies and terms that signify and encompass collective queer existences in their own contexts.

Directed and performed: Ahmad Baba
Assistant Directors: Mansur Ajang
Cinematography: Mansur Ajang
Design and editing: Ahmad Baba
Thanks to Joey Bania, Fadi Saleh and RomanValenta.

This performance was made possible, with the support of AFAC (Arab Fund for Arts and Culture)
آفاق الصندوق العربي للثقافة والفنون

Doors open: 19:00 p.m.

Event start: 19:30 p.m.

Ticket: Donate as much as you like via Eventbrite.

Language: English, Arabic

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Biography

Ahmad Baba 

Ahmad Baba is a Lebanese multidisciplinary performance artist, body politics researcher, and dance therapist, who is based in Berlin. Employing a critical approach to art practices, he meticulously constructs performances that are multilayered, utilizing the body as an archive to connect the past and reimagine the question of future, reshaping virtual realities through the incorporation of multimedia, dance, and interactive elements. Baba's work is firmly grounded in his interest in non-western manuscripts, which serves as a foundation for inquiries into power structures, taxonomies of identities, and relational methodologies. His performances are exquisitely personalized, reflecting his unique experiences and worldview, and seek to disrupt conventional pedagogies around performance and body work that perpetuate hegemonic ideologies. Beyond his prodigious work as a performance artist, Baba holds an MA in Dance Movement Therapy, where his focus lies in the use of accessible body psychotherapy as critical tools for both individual and collective transformation on mental and emotional levels. Placing a particular emphasis on migrant racialized sexual and gender minorities who struggled with accessing inclusive and anti-oppressive therapies in Germany.

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