KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin presents the collective poetry reading Oraib Toukan with Sana Tannoury-Karam and Sara Mourad.
In various works Oraib Toukan has interrogated the ability of ‘cruel images’ to shut down the faculty of language altogether. This poetry reading takes its cue from the artist’s invitation to the scholars and writers Sara Mourad and Sana Tannoury-Karam to collectively read and treat encounters with violence, using spoken word. Together Mourad and Tannoury-Karam curate a selection of verse and prose poems, spanning multiple and interconnected geographies to meditate on shared encounters with the ineffable—through a collective yearning for a language that alters reality by speaking it.
Sara Mourad is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut and currently a fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. She consumes a lot and produces a little bit of poetic non-fiction in verse and prose.
Sana Tannoury-Karam is a writer and historian. She writes on the history of the Arab left and on the subjects of memory, exile, and belonging. She is currently a fellow at the Center for Lebanese Studies at the University of Cambridge and a EUME fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin.
