Join us on July 17th for ArteEast’s Hikayat (meaning stories in Arabic, Armenian, Persian and Turkish)—a vibrant night of multimedia performances including storytelling, spoken word, live projections, and music.
Tongues Untied—is a call to resist the current political moment’s suffocating grip that continues to compromise our ability to publicly share our voices, stories, histories, and lived realities.
Performances by: Niki Afsar, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Rawya El Chab, Muyassar Kurdi, Yesenia Rojas & Kai Sundermann, Hind Shoufani & Timothy Cleary.
DJ Set: Salar Ansari
Date: July 17, 2025
Time: 7:30 pm
Location: Brooklyn Art Haus, Williamsburg, 24 Marcy Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Tickets: $25 Buy Here
Want to share your voice? Sign up for the open mic session, click here to fill out the participant form. All kinds of expressions are welcome!
Get ready to gather, dance, and uplift each other during this night of performances.
Program:
Niki Afsar
Afsar will be performing a sound piece titled “baraye nika,” dedicated to Nika Shakarami. The piece is one of mourning and remembrance punctuated with the silliness of Nika’s teenage moments, as well as chants of hope and conviction in the wake of her murder during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022.
Sevinç Çalhanoğlu
Çalhanoğlu will be reading a prose poem from Flying Dreams, reflecting on flying as both a desire for escape and an attachment to the past. It explores the tension between movement and limits. The reading includes a list of flying dreams of Çalhanoğlu’s friends, in search of the collective nature of shared dreaming.
Rawya El Chab
El Chab will present a short story from her upcoming show, “Crossing the Waters” (2025). The piece recounts the events of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of the city of Beirut in 1982.
Muyassar Kurdi
Kurdi will present an interdisciplinary performance combining 16mm film and poetry. The dance film Field Dances (2019) will be screened alongside a recitation of her new poetry.
Yesenia Rojas & Kai Sundermann
The performance ‘A SUBALTERN ALPHABET’ assembles a ground where light instruments dance with and through riotous repertoires. This ensemble of sound and light sings in refractive harmonies throughout the peripheries of our visible world, into the ‘fourth dimension’, Time, as Brazilian author Clarice Lispector defines it.
Hind Shoufani & Timothy Cleary
This hybrid performance commemorates the lives of all Palestinian children lost to the violence imposed upon them. As a reflection on the horrific story of Hind Rajab, the performance mixes a poetry reading, live music, and a video-art film.
Salar Ansari will close out the evening with a DJ set of rhythmic dance music.
This program is co-presented with Brooklyn Art Haus and is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
