Bint Mbareh
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Bint Mbareh works with all formats of sound (radio, live, installation and many others) and is driven by the superpowers of communal singing human and more than human. She conducted research initially to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. The songs that she learned helped communities summon rain, and at their core helped people build a relationship with their environment, decide what time of year it is, and communally determine how to share resources, mainly the resource of time, fairly. Bint Mbareh makes music and sound today because she believes these uses can still be evoked, rather than remembered. She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary communal upheavals, still looking for these significations in the Palestinian landscape, now in the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), Prophet Moses. She has been a practicing artist since 2018.
She has performed at Mophradat's Read the Room festival (March 2022), at the Hiya Live Sessions in Dalston’s Jago (May 2022), co-founded Exist Festival in Palestine in 2019, She was Café OTO's Youth Music Resident for 2021, She has shown sound and object work at Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, curated by SWAY Barry, Qanat, and LE18 in Marrakech in August 2022. She has performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York as part of Unsound Festival's December 2022 Weavings curated by Nicolás Jaar. She has shown sound work at the Mardin Bienali in May of 2022 invited by Adwait Singh, as well as at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh in July 2022, invited by Sakiya and Cooking Sections. She represented the Exist Festival in 2022's edition of Tehran Contemporary Sounds. She was Mophradat's Art Time Resident at BUDA Kortrijk's NEXT Festival in 2021. She has performed several times in London's Shubbak and AWAN Festivals.
Upcoming performances
Dubai 2024
Bint Mbareh will present work stemming from research into mourning and lamentation music. She works through field recordings from Tunis, Baghdad, Ramallah, London, and the internet to construct dilapidated collages woven together with long, melismatic vocals.
The voice, orality, and therefore temporality are central to the work, questioning the time (often signified by breathing = singing) that can be stolen from the wariness of every day to describe, witness, language, and signify the systematic killing and loss that results from the ongoing apocalypse caused by end-stage capitalism (with settler colonialism as its current symptom).
