A Lifework of Mourning

In a world that produces genocidal catastrophe across scales and seemingly without end, mourning offers a generative praxis of gathered grief, refusal and radical hospitality: a poethics of entanglement that conjures worlds capable of holding the living and the dead in intimate and expanding solidarities, contiguities and kinships.

Join us for an afternoon of cumulative offerings - readings, reflections, gestures and breathwork - grounded in the sonic vigil of Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, alongside a live performance of Christina Sharpe’s commemorative score, To Mark, To Hold, To Labour, To Bear.

Joining Gabrielle and Christina is Sara Nadal-Melsió, former Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program, whose firing coincided with her protest of the Museum’s cancellation of No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, and the shuttering of the ISP’s 2025–2027 programme.

Gabrielle Goliath’s multi-channel video and sound installation, Elegy, opens at Ibraaz on 8 October and will sound throughout the Minassa until 17 January 2027.

Christina Sharpe’s performance score, To Mark, To Hold, To Labour, To Bear, forms part of No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, a series of three commemorative performances conceived by Palestinian performance artist and poet Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and with commissioned scores by Christina Sharpe, Natalie Diaz and Brandon Shimoda.

Doors open at 2.30pm. The event begins at 3pm and ends at 4.30pm.