#nasrin himada

[garadinervi]

Mahmoud Al-Shaer, A Year on the Abyss of Genocide, Foreword by Nasrin Himada, Afterword by Fadi Ennab, Editor's note by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, ARP Books, Winnipeg, 2025 [Palestine Festival of Literature]

[parkersmood]

I want to move away from thinking about art writing. Not as an analytical tool, but as a relational one, and not as a review that explains the object in question, but as a way to extend the work by seriously confronting my love for it, why I love it. So instead of using theory, or theoretical/critical analysis as interventions into my own writing, I feel that I am stepping out for the third time, and sharing with you a multilayered daydream that I hope will resonate into a story, a narrative of sorts that you are able to follow. My intention is to practice being in the work. Which, for me, means I am in the process of writing a love note to these beautiful and moving videos by Ruanne Abu-Rahme and Basel Abbas. I am really thinking about this process as a correspondence. This experiment of mine that I am going to share with you is really coming from thinking about love. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to fall in love with art and how to communicate this expression into writing. As a curator and writer, I am often moved by the capacity in which a work changes me, and I find that is the hardest to articulate. I want to engage with this process of relation in a more rigorous, but also vulnerable, way.  I am moving out of what some would call theoretical writing into memory/daydream writing, to contend not only with the experience of grief and how it is felt in the everyday, but also through a personal and familial way– thinking about my grandparents who have died, and who are dying, and what it means to lose embodied knowledge in that way. I will no longer have access to my history, and that the stories of lineage, of migration, of struggle will be lost. And I am linking all of this to thinking about creating my own personal decolonial methodology. To integrate what I feel, what I image as dream or memory, to consider this as knowledge in its own right: what does it do to write this out as practice, to bring it into articulation for the public?

‘For Many Returns’ by Nasrin Himada for Contemporary (March 2018)