Read the Room - Day #2

The New Agents Variety Show is a night in four acts. Samaa Wakim delivers Nauseating Delirium, a new script written collectively for and on the occasion of the show by the New Agents. A segment of burlesque and its antagonisms is performed by Leila Delicious. The culinary and the macabre come together in an experiment by Common Ground. All this will be accompanied by live music and select tracks by Kid Fourteen. 

The show is developed in response to Mophradat’s prompt guiding the programme: “What Do We Need for the Future?” 

Common Ground is a collaborative artistic project started by Anna Celda and Saja Amro. Using the dining table and the kitchen as research laboratories, it aims to create a caring and comforting space to delve into topics like female labour, inherited knowledge, and culinary histories. Their recent work focuses on envisioning liberation in Palestine and globally by designing collective cooking experiences inspired by ancestral sensory rituals, creating mental and physical spaces for imagination and connection.  

Khodor Ellaik aka Kid Fourteen (1987) is a Lebanese composer, performer and sound artist. His practice is at the crossroads between composition, sound research, writing, performance and the visual identity of the live act. 

Leila Delicious is a Palestinian performance and burlesque artist whose work exists at the epicenter of queer Palestinian decadence. She began her career as a political performance artist and sees burlesque as a continuation of that focus. For Leila, performing indulgence and abundance has become a ritual of embodied decolonization. 

Samaa Wakim is a Palestinian performer, choreographer, and cultural manager based in Haifa. A graduate of the Acting Department at Haifa University, she has performed in local and international shows. As an artist who grew up in Palestine’s rich music and dance culture, Samaa believes in mixing contemporary tools and multidisciplinary arts to contribute to the global arts, as well as the Palestinian cause and preserving its collective identity.  

New Agents is a programme set up by Mophradat that brings together a working group of artists and curators to collaborate and learn together over an 18-month period. The 2023-24 participants are Bayan Kiwan, Dani Arbid, Nour El Safoury, Sara Bouzgarrou, and Siwar Kraytem.  

Bayan Kiwan is an artist based between New York and Amman. Her paintings observe the domestic sphere as a contested site of everyday resistance and intimacy.  

Nour El Safoury is an editor and an independent publisher who in 2020 founded the Cairo-based publishing outfit Esmat Publishing List which she presently runs. Esmat publishes and circulates texts by authors who bridge the arts with other disciplines to open up fresh ways to feel and imagine. She also co-organizes the Cairo Art Book Fair.  

Dani Arbid is a writer, publisher and filmmaker based between London and Berlin. They are the founder of Barakunan, a publishing and media enterprise dedicated to elevating underrepresented BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) creatives. Dani’s work explores the fabrication of new myths through the subversion of genre and format, driven by an instinct toward social and political commentary.  

Siwar Krai(y)tem is a multilingual designer, researcher, and artist based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her research and artistic practice focus on multilingualism and language in times of transformation, as well as the construction of society through language.  

Sara Bouzgarrou is a Tunisian artist, researcher, risograph printer, and art coordinator. She is interested in the intersection between print, food studies, and feminist issues through her interdisciplinary approach.  

Mophradat is a Brussels-based association that creates opportunities for artists from the Arab world through an inventive approach to funding, commissioning, collaborating, and gathering. Launched by Mophradat in 2023, New Agents is a programme that brings together a group of people from across arts fields from the Arab world, whose practices are singular, future facing, and committed to public engagement, to work towards a joint project. The New Agents are Bayan Kiwan, Dani Arbid, Nour El Safoury, Sara Bouzgarrou, and Siwar Krai(y)tem.