defend the dead

The silhoutte of a long-haired figure stands in a dark room before two project screens. The screens display three images: the ocean, a car driving past gravestones, and a close-up detail of a gravestone.

A crowd gathers around two well-lit individuals seated on a red and white patterned rug on a wooden stage. Electronic devices and sound equipment are scatted around them. Both individuals hold their phones, and one reads into a microphone.

A hand lit by red light holds three circular laser-cut wooden discs. In the background, a long wooden spoon and various cooking utensils rest on white, red, and multicoloured rugs spread across the floor.

Dates and Opening times

Fri 5 Jun– Sun 21 Jun

Tue – Sun, 11am – 6pm

Venue

The School House, 217 Orr Street, G40 2BN

Participants

Tami Elkilani Inès Heddar Mana Tashakorinia Myles Westman

Presented by

Tami Elkilani, Inès Heddar, Mana Tashakorinia, and Myles Westman

Supported by

Glasgow International with funds from the Scottish Government's Festival EXPO Fund and Assumption Studios.

Accessiblity

Level Access, Street Level: The venue has ramped or level access and/or lifts to upper floors

Toilets: The venue has toilets available for visitors, but these are not accessible

Accessible Toilets: The venue has a wheelchair accessible toilet

Gender Neutral Toilets: The venue has toilets not separated by gender or sex

Refreshments: There is a café or somewhere you can purchase refreshments

defend the dead is a collaborative exhibition of new work by artists Tami Elkilani, Inès Heddar, Mana Tashakorinia, and Myles Westman, that speaks from a shared diasporic language of cultural and historical displacement, rituals of grief, and archival salvage. Through moving image works, sonic installation, sculpture, and ceramics, the artists bear witness to the precarity of memory.

defend the dead bridges flashpoints across geographical loci including the systematic destruction of the City of the Dead in Cairo, the state-sanctioned murder of Joy Gardner in London, the loss of personal objects during forced migration from Libya, and historical disorientation and political violence in the context of Iranian occult practices. Aspiring to remember as an act of reparation rather than recollection, each work activates these sites of re/memory through fragmentation and fabulation, modes of storytelling that refuse captive notions of what can or cannot be known.

Sustaining collaboration and conversation across imagined borders, the artists weave together strands of archival research and ongoing personal experiences of mourning. Since first gathering as a cohort at Cittadellarte in Biella, Italy, in 2024, they continue to collaborate through an exchange of practices and decolonial knowledges, working from shared axes of political and cultural struggle.