Featuring newly built handmade unconventional instruments, Iraqi artists Sherko Abbas and Kani Kamil, the performance Brouhaha reflects the “brouhaha” of social agitation and displacement, through works focused on noise, sound and the matter of listening by artists living in the Iraqi diaspora.
What is Brouhaha?
Brouhaha is understood as the noise and voice of a state of social agitation. The word “Brouhaha” is strongly connected to the concept of sound, which refers to chaotic noise. As a word, it symbolises the moment when words lose their power.
The performance, which revisits Sherko’s performances of When the Wild Instruments Sing, centres on how the words such as “displacement”, “violence”, “war”, “protest”, “inequality”, “atrocity” and “cruelty” have become a subject of daily news and communications, without any real answer to these issues. Through this noise performance, Sherko and Kani grapple with questions about our political and social situation.
This event is followed by a Q&A with Sherko Abbas and Kani Kamil with Dr Louis Brehony, a scholar of Middle Eastern culture and politics and author of the upcoming book Strings of the Street, on Palestinian music and displacement. He directed the film Kofia: A Revolution Through Music and performs with Gazelleband.
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Originally developed with HOME as part of the Horizons Festival.
