Melted for Love at Arti et Amicitiae

At Arti et Amicitiae, the Sonic Acts Biennial exhibition searches for traces of love, material and otherwise, held within grief, loss and dispossession; from floating microorganisms to rhizomatic forests, love here is not only a human project.

Nour Shantout stitches threads of ancestry and land defence into Palestinian embroidery. Noor Abed’s film, a farewell song set within the ongoing Nakba, builds a collective rhythm that forms and sustains community. Dominique White summons nautical myths of the Black diaspora, led by the voices of the shipwrecked in the depths of the Atlantic.

In two works commissioned by Sonic Acts, Ameneh Solati lets the trembling waters of the Euphrates lament lost lands and their fugitive inhabitants, and HUNITI GOLDOX turns to mangrove forests in the world’s intertidal zones and the regenerative intelligence they hold. Arjuna Neuman follows the drifting dust of Californian wildfires, attending to the stories of indentured migrant labour and the quiet solidarities that grow from them.

Works: A Night We Held Between (Noor Abed); A refusal to be contained, a refusal to die (Dominique White); Fever Dream (Arjuna Neuman); Love Poems (Nour Shantout); Mangrove Intelligence (HUNITI GOLDOX); Might Water Grieve? (Ameneh Solati).