Join us on Wednesday 20th May, 6:30–8:30pm for how to cannibalise the dead, a discursive participatory performance and workshop with Palestinian artist Izdihar Afyouni.

Exploring consent, narrative, authorship, and re-representation, this session examines how narratives are shaped and exploited as they cross geographical and cultural borders. Participants are asked to interrogate the direct and indirect violence that results from the circulation of stories, especially when cultural institutions exclude the original authors or subjects from the production and presentation of their narratives.

Combining participatory performance and discussion, the session invites participants to prepare a first-hand oral testimony in advance, submitting it as either a written text or a voice note for transcription prior to the session. This can be a personal story or a published first-person account, brought as material to be used within the workshop (guidance and examples will be provided in the sign-up form).

Working in groups, participants will randomly select a testimony and adapt it into an institutional format, such as exhibition text, a media output, or a programme proposal.

The workshop will consider the violence of the unknown narrative, how value is assigned to stories, how control can be reclaimed in spaces where narratives are shaped without consent, and what it means to refuse institutional gatekeeping and resist the pressures of funding bodies.

Please arrive from 6pm for a prompt 6:30pm start.

This free event will take place at Auto Italia and is open to artists, curators, and cultural workers working across socially and politically engaged practices. To book, follow the link here or email info@artworkassociation.org

Izdihar Afyouni is a queer Palestinian multidisciplinary artist and writer working across large format painting, participatory performance, film and text. Their practice draws on Palestinian literature, oral testimonies, BDSM practices and colonial archives to interrogate carceral and genocidal colonial logic and political (ab)uses of the body, often using site-specific and participatory structures that collapse the space between spectator and subject. She is co-editing and writing for the upcoming publication Needles in the Eye: Refusal and the Necropolitics of Cultural Production with Gelare Khoshgozaran.