Up Next — farrah rahaman

The Claudia Jones Project | Palimpsest

Selected Works, Writings, Exhibitions
Up Next

Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood featuring Sonia Sanchez
followed by conversation with Imani Perry

blues haiku

let me be yo wil 
derness let me be yo wind 
blowing you all day.

- Sonia Sanchez

This performance and conversation will be an offering in color, sound and transmuting the of violence state and carceral systems in ways that Black people have always embodied through relationship to community, self and spirit. The performance reflects on the idea of home places and witness, with Sonia Sanchez and Immanuel Wilkins sharing roots, inheritances and formational experiences in Philadelphia.

As Christina Sharpe has written in the liner notes for the project, “The body and its references and influences are central to Wilkins collaborations and his gathering, innovating, improvising, and extending. He is playing us into a future, bringing the past along but sounding it differently.” For Brent Hayes Edwards, “The profound achievement of Blues Blood is like a translation of the theorist Stuart Hall’s influential proposition that “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Wilkins has given us a suite that says the same thing in a different tongue. Blue is the modality in which black is lived.”

This event is all ages, and free and open to the public. More information here.

Fragmented Return

a multimedia performance by Palestinian artists Huda Asfour and Farah Barqawi

When Huda (b. 1982) and Farah (b. 1985) first met in Gaza in 1997, neither could have anticipated that their brief musical performance at the Latin Patriarchate School, also known as Deir al-Latine, would become the catalyst for a lifelong journey.

Fragmented Return is a multimedia performance by Palestinian artists Huda Asfour and Farah Barqawi, blending elements of their experiences with exile and attempts at return. Through words, music, and visuals, they weave a shared narrative of lives shaped by occupation, displacement, and borders, as well as by joy, resistance, and a quest for collective liberation.

Their intertwined experiences across cities such as Gaza, Cairo, and more recently Brooklyn, bring to the stage a retelling of their version of Palestinian diaspora and the constant struggle of belonging, all viewed through a critical political lens, delivered with humor and raw emotions.

Registration details

All guests are required to register for this event through Eventbrite. For those who do not register in advance, we will require registration on site with proof of ID.

Restitution Cinema is a film program that considers the impossibility of repair, and the traction in reaching for it anyways. It is about the many errant pathways towards recovery, removed from the idealism of a pure precolonial, pre-contact past, and rooted in the material, psychic and embodied ways of restoring our cultural endowments in the current anti-colonial terrain.

This presentation includes the films Dahomey dir. Mati Diop (2024), You Hide Me dir. Nii Kate Owo (1980), Statues Also Die dir. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker originally commissioned by Présence Africaine (1953) and The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2018) dir. Adam and Zach Kahlil (2018), as well as a Kumina performance accompanying the screening of A Story of Bones (2023) dir. Annina Van Neel and finally a case study panel and screening of four Actualités Senegalaises (Senegalese newsreels) recently returned to the Government’s national archive.

Explore the reading list linked here.

The program will take place over the course of March 2025 at the Penn Museum. Restitution Cinema is organized and curated by Farrah Rahaman, Deborah A. Thomas and Hakimah Abdul-Fattah, alongside CAMRA and the Center for Experimental Ethnography.

March 7: Interiors | Rainey Auditorium
March 15: A Story of Bones + Kumina Performance | Widener Auditorium
March 17: The Missing Image | Public Trust