Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) will present Out of the Shadows III, an interactive one-time performance by celebrated Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud on Friday, Feb. 23, 7 p.m., at the Wolfson Campus Auditorium.
Out of the Shadows III uses music and storytelling to take its audience on an enchanted tour of fabled locations possessed by both politics and the supernatural.
Abboud asks “What do places speak of?” in this audio-visual performance that includes Palestinian folktales and traditional oral histories.
These stories that inspire the artist always have emphasized the importance of relationships with the landscape and with sources of water.
Evoking her Palestinian roots and the places to which she is deeply connected — Jerusalem, Jericho, the Dead Sea, and Galilee — the artist uses music, poems, and drawings to weave together past and present, contemporary reality and the unseen world with its jinns and ghoulehs.
Abboud collaborates with Issa Freij for this world premiere, and the artists reflect on their experiences during a four-year film project as they searched for the haunted sites of which the tales tell. Their interactive narrative explores folk customs, sacred objects, and bewitched locations to underscore themes of memory, loss, and resilience.
The 47-yea-old Abboud lives and works in Jerusalem and her work has been exhibited at the Venice, Sharjah and Istanbul biennials, the Bahrain National Museum, and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Freij, Born in 1956, is a Palestinian photographer, filmmaker, and musician, also living and working in Jerusalem.
Out of the Shadows III is part of Living Together, a cross-disciplinary series of programs intended to galvanize Miami audiences with thoughtful and challenging performances and exhibitions that draw from art, music, theater, politics, and poetry. Living Together seeks to find new ways to think about civic space and citizenship, to instigate actions and conversations that may help us to reimagine our cities and our lives.
Living Together will take place at various sites across the greater Miami area through September and will include works by 17 of the most acclaimed national and international artists, art collectives, musicians, and writers. Events in the series will be produced by MOAD MDC in collaboration with a range of other Miami institutions, and most events will be free and open to the public.
The performance takes place at the Auditorium of MDC Wolfson Campus, Building 1, 300 NE Second Ave. The event is free but reservations are required. RSVP at the MOAD MDC website at www.mdcmoad.org/.
