Fish Bar Symposium

Segment from the BBC documentary (Venice Biennale, Britain’s New Voices, 2017) featuring the Grove Fish Bar and Square Root London.

#neodiaspora (undercommons)

Link to text: https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf

Square Root Soda Works (Liquid Modernity)

Link to text: https://arena-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/10478405/1901faaa87e299be81d790d1d2cecf7d.pdf?1611952677

EVERYTHING MUST GO

LINK: https://www.gumtree.com/p/arts-crafts/diaspora-pavilion-closing-down-sale-manna-2017-by-abbas-zahedi/1307823456

Public Engagement (Convivial Antagonism)

Link to text: https://emmacummins-writer.com/essays/art-antagonism-and-relational-aesthetics/

Tate Exchange(d)

Link to interview: https://www.amaliah.com/post/39422/jumah-tate-interview-artist-abbas-zahedi

Tate Soup

LIVE ARCHIVE (Site Specifics)

And ultimately on the fact that in a reflective shift, from the analytical to the performative function of
observation and of participation, we can agree that meaning is not excavated for, but rather, that it
takes place in the present.

Link to text: http://xenopraxis.net/readings/rogoff_smuggling.pdf

I have been instructed to speak less of my past, preferably to do away with it, especially when it comes to artistic practice. At first I was excited by the freedom this offered; to be civilised, instead of just cultured. An opportunity to sit within a canon of formalistic forms and formulations – a space in which ‘identity’ no longer functions. Because my past is heavy, it is too much of a burden. Others cannot relate to its particularities, the punctum of its weight.

Hence it may not be clear why I have chosen to install an empty bottle fridge, filled with the sounds of grief, as a degree show piece. The premise of this work is to offer a kind of libation, within a space where the serving and spilling of drinks is forbidden. For I am mourning the death of my neighbour, friend and colleague Khadija Saye; because I cannot be in this space without thinking of her. She was the one who brought me here two years ago, to see a previous version of this degree show and made me promise that I would join her as a prospective student, so as to graduate together in the summer of 2019. Yet I stand here alone today, because a few weeks after that encounter, Khadija was killed in the fire of Grenfell Tower, a blaze that was apparently caused by the faultiness of an immigrant’s fridge.