Exhibition’s text
Noor Abed’s exhibition at Imane Farès, to those who see in the dark, can be said to follow the very structure of the territory that appears so insistently throughout her work, especially her films. In a room below, four of her films are gathered, from Penelope (2014) to we walk in our sleep (2026). This lower room might be understood as a well, or as a cave excavated deep into the earth, a subterranean chamber from which the rest of her work quite literally emanates. Above, closer to the surface of the earth, we encounter the photographs, the drawings, and the notes.
In Noor Abed’s films, territory, dance, and mourning are inseparable. They do not appear as subjects that the films set out to represent, but rather as forces that continually transform one another. Territory is never simply landscape; dance is never merely choreography; mourning is never confined to grief. Together they form a language through which Abed asks how bodies inhabit a land saturated with memory, violence, disappearance, and forms of life that nevertheless persist. Territory is something bodily. It is crossed, touched, excavated, remembered, danced upon, hidden within. The land possesses depth. It contains other times. It holds stories, bodies, voices, myths, and gestures that may disappear but never cease to exist.
Dance provides a means of entering this living archive. Noor Abed is interested in gesture as a form of knowledge. A body knows things that may never have been formulated in words. It carries movements learned from other bodies, from celebrations, work, ritual, family, folklore, and collective life. Her choreographies often begin with recognizable gestures only to detach them slightly from their original function. Repetition, synchronization, mirroring, circling, falling, carrying, touching, or simply walking can suddenly acquire an incredible intensity.
Choreography in Abed’s films is political. Occupation attempts to determine how bodies can move through space: where one may go, where one must stop, which territories can be reached and which cannot, what is accessible and what has been severed. Against this regulation of movement, Abed proposes another understanding: dance does not abolish the material reality of borders or violence, but it produces relations that exceed them. The body remembers routes that have been interrupted; it repeats gestures whose origins may be older than the political structures controlling the present; it establishes continuities between bodies, generations, and places. Choreography becomes a form of territorial imagination.
In Penelope (2014) a woman sits surrounded by dead fish and patiently sews them together. The gesture is repetitive, and somehow impossible so that it becomes tender. Penelope’s labor connects bodies that are already dead, producing a strange fabric. Mourning here is the activity of joining: the attempt to maintain relations with that which has been lost, killed.
In our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021), folklore, landscape, movement, and death become intertwined. Wells, caves, disappearance, song, ritual, and choreographed bodies produce a world in which myth is not opposed to reality but becomes another way of perceiving it. The landscape is populated by stories and by the absent. Palestinian folktales are not treated as remnants of an older culture to be preserved ethnographically; they are activated in the present.
In A Night We Held Between (2024) the geological landscape—caves, underground spaces, rocks, valleys—appears again as a body itself. With the film we descend into the land while an archival female voice brings another historical moment into the present. Past and present merge. The dead, the disappeared, the fighters, the singers, and those walking through the landscape inhabit overlapping temporalities.
In we walk in our sleep (2026), this idea seems to reach a new intensity. The Arabic title, al-mutajāwizūn—those who cross, pass beyond, exceed—offers a key to this movement. Crossing is not only geographical. Bodies cross between times and states of being. Speech crosses between one person and another. Gestures cross generations. The dead therefore remain capable of affecting how the living speak, gather, remember, and imagine. Shot on Super 8 in the villages of north-west Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with Abed’s family, friends, and neighbours, the film unfolds through a succession of scenes in which ordinary Palestinian life repeatedly slips into choreography. Two women’s voices accompany these images in parallel monologues, sometimes approaching one another and sometimes drifting apart.
Above the well
If the films propose an artistic practice capable of keeping different spaces, temporalities, and people from other times connected—allowing what seems to have disappeared to retain an active presence in the present—the images, drawings, and notes displayed in the upper part of the gallery respond to a somewhat different logic. Unlike other interpreters, Hannah Arendt did not read Penelope’s myth as a strategy for postponing the completion of the tapestry and, with it, the decision of who should replace Odysseus. For Arendt, Penelope stands for thinking itself. What is woven during the day must be undone at night. Thinking, in this sense, cannot always aspire to produce a final form. At certain moments in history, thought itself must remain open; it must establish a continuous movement capable of saying and unsaying itself, of making and unmaking its own propositions, rather than settling into a fixed form, a truth, a discourse, or a final condition.
In the exhibition, Noor Abed follows a similar logic. The fragments presented upstairs—photographs, drawings, notes, images—do not constitute the preparatory stages of something waiting to become complete. Nor are they evidence leading towards a definitive interpretation. Fragmentation is itself a mode of research: a way of exploring the necessity of making connections despite their apparent impossibility. For me, this room brings back to those nights when pain makes sleep impossible and one can do little more than write a fragment here and there: an observation, a piece of conversation, a memory, while past and future lives seem to enter the room together. The fragment stays close to a moment, to a feeling, to a memory of a loved one… it preserves the singular way in which one person receives and transmits the world. These fragments do not attempt to make experience whole, but near: they keep the joy close, they keep the panic close, within reach, allowing what is personal, unfinished, to become a form of thought in its own right. They embody something profoundly political and radically important: the refusal to transform Palestinian experience into abstraction.
– Chus Martínez
Biography of the artist
Noor Abed (Palestine) is an artist working at the intersection of performance and film. Her research focuses on the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community. Abed considers how alternative forms of representation can disrupt established discourses and open up possibilities for new collective imaginaries.
She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, in 2016-17. She was a fellow at the Raw Material Company in Dakar in 2019. In 2020, she co-founded the School of Intrusions, an independent educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator for documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, 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. Abed is the Grand prize recipient of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Her book Stars at Midday was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024.
to those who see in the dark is her first solo exhibition in France.