Another Kind of Relation

Abdelrahman ElGendy’s memoir, Huna, begins with a seventeen-year-old taking part in a street demonstration in Cairo in 2013. It moves through his arrest, six years of political imprisonment, and the strange work of becoming a person under conditions designed to make personhood impossible.

To mark the UK publication of Huna, ElGendy will be joined by multidisciplinary actor and activist Khalid Abdalla for a conversation about what happens when the act of writing and making begins as, but refuses to be reduced to, testimony. Together, they will consider language as a site of tension and interplay between Arabic and English, intimacy and distance, the private self and the political subject.

Drawing on Huna and their wider artistic practices, ElGendy and Abdalla will explore the kinds of relations language can create between writer and reader. How does writing or performing the revolutionary and the carceral alter and inform one’s relationship to time, and to language as craft, shelter, confrontation, and risk? What happens when the reader is denied the comfort of complete access? How can form become a way of resisting the demand to render oneself fully transparent? And what other modes of call and response might this open between writer and reader at the moment of encounter?

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

Image credit: the eleven Arabic section headers of Huna, designed by lettering artist Kristyan Sarkis. Courtesy of the artist.