Noor Abed
Noor Abed (b. 1988, Palestine, lives and works between Ramallah and Amsterdam) works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her practice examines social choreographies and collective formations, exploring the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action.
Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program HWP at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2016-17. She was a fellow at the Raw Material Company in Dakar in 2019, and in 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta 15, and an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. She was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/ Museu Tàpies Film Production Grant in 2022, and her film ‘A Night We Held Between’ was selected as a first-prize winner of the e-flux Film Award 2024.
A Night We Held Between
2024
Digital transfer of 16mm film, 30 min
Courtesy of the artist
The artwork is centred on the original recording of a woman singing a song that she calls Song for The Fighters, a folk piece the artist found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Centre Palestine.The film is shot among ancient landscapes – caves, underground passages, carved rock formations, and wild valleys, and the land itself becomes the film’s main character. Through layered sound and movement, Abed conjures history as a collective and imaginative present, blending rituals of community and resistance with everyday life in Palestine.
A Night We Held Between is produced with the support of the Han Nefkens Foundation –Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.