U nukuch che’ilo’ob chiicho’ob yéetel noolo’ob
Between my Heart and the Kitchen: My Stomach
A performance by artist Shayma Hamad
13. September 2025
17.00-18.00
17.00-18.00
Save the Date
For free
all ages welcome
Arabic/in English
Presented within the exhibition aʿmāl al-’arḍ – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, Shayma Hamad’s performance Between my Heart and the Kitchen: My Stomach departs from the act of kneading dough—an everyday gesture that in Palestine carries profound ties to loss and mourning. Here, kneading is not merely a domestic task, but a bodily movement saturated with memory, its rhythm echoing the acts of digging and burial.
The performance draws on recipes and practices passed on by Palestinian women, where the kitchen is transformed into a collective ritual imbued with prayer and remembrance. The word Naqeesa—the name for foods prepared for the bereaved—also signifies loss. This doubleness is present in mourning traditions, where women gather to knead sacred wheat into doughs, remembering the departed through touch and repetition.
Hamad carries these embodied practices into the performative space. Pressing, kneading, and turning become gestures that hold grief and resilience together, turning an intimate act of nourishment into a ritual of endurance and release.
Within the broader framework of aʿmāl al-’arḍ — Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, this performance resonates with the exhibition’s exploration of how practices rooted in land and the everyday—whether sowing, kneading, or sounding—become collective acts of memory, resistance, and survival.
