Stranger Within
Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Stockholm, Alta, Kirkenes, Kautukeino, Tromso
Since 2017, in the north of Norway, Mia and Jassem have performed in people's houses in exchange of a dinner or a coffee. The work has been developed in the spirit of hosting strangers with strangeness, where art is stuck inside reality. Habib and Hindi use found objects, lo-fi recordings, fantastique-realist poems and their own bodies. Stranger Within is a collective endeavor, and for many of the editions they invite guest artists they have met along the road in the North. The guests add their own perspective to what absence and strangeness feels like.
Haunting: That which roams unseen and quiet upon the land signals that what is not here is moving us. Absence is a powerful drive. The word is often found at a muddy crossroad between performance and politics. Stranger Within is a haunted landscape that maintains a multiplicity of absences; organic, historical and ecosystemic. They start to behave strangely; shaking bodies, breaking objects, shaping menacing figures.
Stranger within is a performance which makes use of an installation of artifacts. It is a broken historiography, shaped like a haunted land, fretting at the remains of the day. Agents made out of sounds, driftwood, plastic and flesh, are disseminated, lurking. Stranger within is the work of a sleeper: the story unfolds using displacement, condensation and disruption. It is structured like a dream set in the rural north of Norway. It explores the fabric of what makes a political unconscious.
‘’Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde wrote. Perhaps the Stranger Within are mind-bodies who challenge the lies our Western art institutions are built upon, and that make us believe that poetry is a luxury: the aura of unattainability surrounding the figure of the artist, the space relations between the work of art and its beholder, and the very notion of work of art, beyond performance’s nature as both material and immaterial phenomenon’’
Locality in transit: impressions on Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi's Stranger Within
Deise Nunes
Pre-production for Stranger Within was by Kira Senkpiel / Mia Habib Productions
Stranger Within premiered during Bastard Festival 2018, September 11 - 14 at Galleri KIT in Trondheim. With guest performers Siri Broch Johanssen and Sina Seifee.
October 11 - 20, 2018, Stranger Within was shown at Interkulturelt Museum, Oslo, with guests Nils-Rune Utsi aka SlinCraze, LATERNA / Inger-Reidun Olsen & Marianne Skjeldal, Ingun Mæhlum and Sina Seifee.
October 23 - 24, 2018, Oktoberdans, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen.
SITE, Stockholm, December 2018
Produced by
- TrAP
- Mia Habib Productions
Co-producers
- Black Box teater
- Interkulturelt Museum – Oslo Museum
- Teaterhuset Avantgarden
- BIT Teatergarasjen
- SITE
Other partners
- Sina Seifee
- Siri Broch Johansen
- Kirsten Opstad
- Helle Siljeholm
- Ingunn Mæhlum
- Pikene på broen
Supported by
- Arts Council Norway
- Fond for lyd og bilde
- Municipality of Oslo