Image: Nour Sokhon performing Revisiting: Resisting Turbulence, photo: © Nabeeh Samaan
Artist Talk and Concert with Nour Sokhon
In the context of Port Fiction – a project by Moritz Frischkorn in collaboration with IMAGINE THE CITY
Friday, 24 November 2023
6 pm: Artist talk
8 pm: Concert: Resisting Turbulence: Revisited (Nour Sokhon)
Hosted by Kunsthaus Hamburg
The project Port Fiction presents itself in a talk with the entire artistic team. Port Fiction is a documentary project about the connection between the two port cities Hamburg and Beirut. After the heavy explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020, a team of Lebanese and Hamburg artists came together to investigate their own relationship to the port. Based on an understanding that the two cities cannot be compared, they nevertheless asked: How are they linked to each other, where do they touch? In the form of a digital longread, the contributions of the artists Myriam Boulos (photography), Moritz Frischkorn (text), Robin Hinsch (photography), Ibrahim Nehme (text), Siska (film) and Nour Sokhon (composition and sound design) are woven into a collective narrative. In conversation with the initiator of the project, Moritz Frischkorn, the participating artists talk about their respective artistic contributions to the website and reflect on the collective work process.
The artist-talk will be followed by a live performance of Nour Sokhon at 8 pm. Her audio-visual performance Revisiting: Resisting Turbulence serves to extend the work Resisting Turbulence into a live intimate shared journey with an audience. The work uses a selection of Myriam Bolous’s images from What’s Ours as a score to build the auditory landscape of the performance. The initial project began in 2019, with both artists conducting a series of interviews arbitrarily as they were walking across the streets of their city, their home, Beirut. In a matter of just a few days, after the interviews had been recorded, the Lebanese revolution began. As carriers of intergenerational post war trauma, both artists are fueled by the notion of infinite possibilities for a reawakening to take place in a city that is burdened by a constant state of restlessness. The interviewees that willingly shared their personal narratives with meticulous detail shone light upon people’s desire to be heard. Resisting Turbulence morphed into a timeline of people’s state of paralysis before the revolution and awakening after it began. Revisiting: Resisting Turbulence stretches the timeline further as it questions the state of the country after its recent upheavals, being the economic collapse and the Beirut 2020 Port Blast.
Nour Sokhon is a Lebanese artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her creative practice is centered around exploring different methods of working with artistic research including interview material, field recordings and recorded material from an organized site specific intervention. The research is then translated into sound/music compositions, performances, interactive installations and moving image work. In 2014, Nour achieved an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the American University in Dubai, and in 2017 she culminated a large-scale project; a documentary entitled People on Sound, as part of her Master’s degree in Sound for the Moving Image at the Glasgow School of Art in the UK. In 2019, Nour received the Emerging Artist Prize at the Sursock Museum in Lebanon, for a moving image piece entitled Revisiting: Hold Your Breath.
Nour has exhibited her artwork in Beirut, Dubai, London, Glasgow, Paris, Hamburg, Madrid, Zurich, Hastings, Utrecht, Berlin, Zagreb, Juterbog, Sellasia, Montreal, London, India, Melbourne and Soustons. She has also performed in Frankfurt, Berlin, Beirut, Athens, Hannover, Dubai, Paris, Amsterdam, Athens, Zurich, Bern, and in various festivals such as the Al Quoz Arts Festival (Dubai, UAE), the Other Worlds Festival (Blackpool, UK), the Network Music Festival 2020 (online), This Is Not Lebanon 2021 (Frankfurt, Germany), Punkt Festival 2023 (Kristiansand, Norway) and Gaudeamus Festival 2023 (Utrecht, Netherlands).
PORT FICTION is a project by Moritz Frischkorn, in collaboration with IMAGINE THE CITY and Kunsthaus Hamburg. The project is supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from NEUSTART KULTUR – the rescue and future-oriented package for the fields in arts and culture, financed by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM). The exhibition and event series are funded by Susanne und Michael Liebelt Stiftungsfonds under the roof of Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.