Bio / About the work / C.V.
1. Bio
2. Liner notes
C.V. link here
1. Bio
Jassem el Hindi (b. Saudi Arabia) is French Palestinian Lebanese artist and performer based in Norway.
He examines the double bind of haunting and hospitality, in the company of death poems and distorted folk art. His work is based on broken dances, broken objects, broken texts, cast in nervousness and necessity.
His latest dance pieces are based on arab death poems - works by Etel Adnan, Nazik El Malaika, with western counterparts: Aase Berg, CA Conrad, Tor Ulven - in order to generate baroque, cruel, cosmological worlds. His work often starts with a death poem and a set of iconographic material.
Aside from his solo work, el Hindi also creates sound pieces for numerous choreographers around the world.
Latest collaborators: Sina Seifee, Mia Habib, Harald Beharie, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Ligia Lewis, Keith Hennessy, Clara Furey. el Hindi’s work is shown internationally, and his collaborations have won numerous awards and nominations (Bessie Award, the Dublin Fringe Jury prize, the PICA Portland Jury’s choice, Hedda pris, 8:tension…)
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el Hindi’s most recent performance works have been centered on
death-poems: (Laundry of Legends I and II, Future Friendship) and on hospitality and haunting (Stranger Within, Murder Dance).
He works with hybrid formats: performances laced with installations, poems, storytelling, drawings, sound art.
His sound art, design, and music has been featured in numerous award winning dance performances around the world.
Collaborators: Mia Habib, Ligia Lewis, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Ruairi Donovan, Walid Hindi, Keith Hennessy, Harald Beharie, Simon Portigal, Clara Furey, Dennis Dieter, Elina Pirinen, Sina Seifee, Barbara Raes and many more.
About the work:
I am haunted by others' voices: I use, edit, corrupt and celebrate. I am not a musician, nor a dancer, nor a visual artist. There should always be something I'm missing in my practice. I believe that any virtuoso act is an act of foreclosure, and I am much more interested in unstable systems, offering space for other things to happen, and thus always flirting with failure.
I use extended techniques of poetry-telling to revisit what the potential of a poem is, more particularly death poems, and how they can be used as an actual collective political practice. These performances are not speculative lessons, things to do in the future; they are political practices for the here and now - not delaying the moment to be together.
In my work as a sound artist with dance, I also thrive to manifest sound as a dancing body and not as a simple ornament to frame dance. It is a simple political and poetical position which supports the idea that the practice of sound, even if it can be conceptualised - or read through the filter of emotions - is also a silent practice - its thickness, just like the one of a body, remains opaque. This opacity is where I believe a dancer and a sound can meet.
My work is generated by nervousness and necessity, making use of broken stories, broken objects and broken sounds. It is a pluri-idiomatic approach, and a meshing up of heterogeneous textures.
I use any practice that is within my vicinity: dance, linear and non linear storytelling, poetry, drawings, installations, sound art and music.
I am researching other ways to understand transmission and transformation: (his)stories, heard and unheard, are often stripped out of the shimmering eco-systems in which they must be hosted, and their revolutionary strength is therefore weakened. Worlds get rationaled into positive information, neglecting the collective endeavour of both transformation and transmission, the playfulness of (mis)understanding. There is a political game that is played by a certain hospitality to the unheard that runs parallel to the resonance between non-linear time and heterogeneous spaces.
About the sound crafting:
As a musician, I use mainly diverted machines, lo-fi field recordings, feedbacks, in the spirit of experimental music (Graham Lambkin, Andrea Neumann, Kevin Drumm, Jason Lescalleet) influenced by doom, cinema and video editing techniques and older masters in the likes of Alvin Lucier, Parmegiani or Bellini.
As a sound maker, I am part of the experimental scene, in all its diversity and hybrid art practices. My most recent sound collaborators in the past year are Axel Dörner, Olivier di Placido, Basile Ferriot, Magda Mayas, Tony Buck, Jakob Riis, Martin & Maria Küchen. In the spirit of the improvised music scene I have played in in situ concerts with a wide range of musicians in and from various continents.
I also teach a variety of workshops about sound, performance, or theory.