Miami, Feb. 8, 2018 — Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) will present Out of the Shadows III, a captivating, interactive, one-time performance by the celebrated Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud at 7 p.m., Feb. 23 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.
In Out of the Shadows III, Abboud asks “What do places speak of?” This audio-visual performance includes Palestinian folk-tales and traditional oral histories. These stories that inspire the artist have always 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.
For this world premiere, Abboud collaborates with Issa Freij, 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.
Born in 1971, Abboud lives and works in Jerusalem. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice, Sharjah and Istanbul biennials, the Bahrain National Museum, and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions and performances of her work have taken place at BALTIC, Gateshead; Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah; Bildmuseet, Umea; and The Khaled Shoman Foundation-Darat al Funun, Amman.
Born in 1956, Freij is a Palestinian photographer, filmmaker, and musician, also living and working in Jerusalem. During the last two decades, Freij has worked in photojournalism, documentary, and short and feature films. He has worked for CBS news, Channel 4, BBC Discovery, and ARTE France. Frej has also worked on films for The Palestinian Museum, Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, Yabous Cultural Centre, and Al-Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem.
Out of the Shadows III is part of Living Together, an exciting cross-disciplinary series of programs that will galvanize Miami audiences with thoughtful and challenging performances and exhibitions that draw from art, music, theater, politics, and poetry. Spread across the city at a wide array of venues, the series features performances, exhibitions, film and video screenings, readings, talks, and workshops that will reflect the cultural, social, and political realities of how we live now. 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.
MOAD MDC celebrates its grand opening on April 5 by presenting Living Together at various sites across the greater Miami area through September. It 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 curators of Living Together are Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator of MOAD MDC, and Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator based in New York.
Jumana Emil Abboud: Out of the Shadows III
Performance: Friday, February 23, 7:30 p.m.
MDC Wolfson Auditorium
MDC Wolfson Campus, Building 1
300 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami
This event is free; reservations are required.
RSVP at MOAD MDC website at http://www.mdcmoad.org/.
Living Together is made possible by the generous support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council; the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council.
Please visit the MOAD MDC website for updates and a full schedule of events: http://www.mdcmoad.org/.
Press Contacts: JWI PR—Jessica Wade Pfeffer: 305-804-8424, jessica@jwipr.com; or Juliana Gutierrez: 305-991-4259, juliana@jwipr.com.