2025 SEASON
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Arab.AMP & The Lab present
DISCOSTAN ft. Checkpoint 303 Saturday, April 26 / Doors 8pm Decolonizing the dancefloor since 2011, DISCOSTAN returns to San Francisco for a special evening featuring Checkpoint 303, led by Tunisian producer SC Mocha. Joined by DJ ariB, and together with Arab.AMP, we present a diasporic discotheque which imagines past, present and future soundscapes. In step with community, this night’s DJs and sound artists raise awareness and inspire action on behalf of our liberation struggle and revolution. Featuring: @discostan @checkpoint303 @dj.ari.b Directed by Leyya Mona Tawil, Arab.AMP is a platform for experimental live art, music and ideas by artists of the SWANA diaspora, the region, and our allied communities. The Arab.AMP 2025 season highlights practices of listening and action; through sound, performance and conversation.Arab.AMP receives lead support from the Hewlett Foundation and the California Arts Council. |
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Arab.AMP Opens 2025 at The Lab
Strider / St Celfer Thursday, January 30, 2025 The Lab - San Francisco 8pm doors Tix here We usher in the Arab.AMP 2025 season at The Lab with Strider - the longtime duo of Joanna Mattrey and Steve Long. The group’s alchemical procedures fuse together field recordings, found objects, derelict instruments, keyboards, bowed strings, to create ambient soundscapes in miniature. Our evening opens with St Celfer, the folk, glitch, improvisational project of john macdougall parker who asserts, "There is a lot of noise today - we just need to hear the music within it." |
2024 Season
AMP Folktales Episode Series
AMP LIVE, Residencies, gathering
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AMP Gathering 2024
Sunday, December 15th, 1-4pm Conversations with Ebti, Nadya and Leyya Live Music ~ Tlet Mori Kapwa // تلات 森 ᜃᜉ᜔ᜏ Arab.AMP will be hosting our annual AMP Gathering on Sunday, December 15th at 1pm at TAC Temescal Art Center in Oakland. This afternoon will feature performances by Tlet Mori Kapwa - the trio of Camellia Boutros, Michael Morales, and Kumi Maxson; and a reflective conversation between Ebti (AMP x AANM Resident Artist), Nadya Tannous (Host of AMP Folktales), and Leyya Mona Tawil (Director of Arab.AMP). The culture keepers and creators of the Arab/SWANA region play a crucial role in uplifting the liberation struggle in Palestine and providing a space for people in the diaspora to be in community, engage, and ground. Join us for an afternoon of reflection and future-thinking as we reflect on the past year’s programming, discuss our efforts regionally, and look to the horizon - together. Food and drinks from:: Shawarmaji: @theshawarmaji Bakesale Betty: @bakesalebetty Reem's Bakery: @reemscalifornia Drake's Barrel House: @drakesbarrelhouse Cole Hardware Wine: @colehardware |
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AMP Folktales Episode 17
Commissioned Artist: Thea Farhadian Community Spotlight on Mask Off Maersk! with Nadya Tannous Premieres Oct 26th 2024 For our final episode of AMP Folktales, and at the harrowing one-year mark of on ongoing genocide in Palestine, we place our Community Spotlight as a call to action - Arms Embargo Now! Learn more about the Mask Off Maersk campaign and how you can participate in a local action. Commissioned artisit Thea Farhadian is a violinist/composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her solo pieces for violin and electronics combine a classical music background with extended technique, and digital processing. For the Arab Amp Residency she will be premiering a new set of structured improvisations which span between textured based or noise based material to tonal and microtonal sounds. |
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AMP x AANM Artist in Residence 2024 / Ebti
September 2024 at the Arab American National Museum Dearborn MI Read Ebti's blog posts! "When I had to come up with the theme for my time at AANM I looked at the website and saw that a big part of the collection consists of everyday objects people brought with them as they migrated to the US or objects donated to the archive. Objects that hold stories and document a history of a person/of a people. On Friday the 13th from 6-8pm, I will be on the rooftop of the AANM for the “rooftop rendevouz” series, hosting an event, where people can come and talk to me about things and stuff they have been carrying around or moving with them and what it means to them. A way to get a look into how we create comfort for ourselves and how we make our own little homes." |
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AMP Folktales Episode #16
Ft. Commissioned Artist Mobina Nouri Nadya Tannous' Community Spotlight on the SUMUD: Resistance Until Liberation Mural Premieres July 27, 2024 Nadya will talk us through the SUMUD: Resistance Until Liberation Mural, its history, symbolism, and collaborators. The SUMUD Mural is a deeply collaborative project between artists and activists in the U.S. and Palestine that explores and confronts the deep interconnections between the brutal systems of imprisonment in the U.S. and Palestine. Over 35 local organizations are involved in its creation. The mural will serve as a demonstration of the Palestinian Liberation Movement’s vibrancy and a memorialization of this historical moment in our struggle globally and locally in the Bay Area. Mobina Nouri is an Iranian-American Multi-disciplinary artist based in San Francisco whose practice reflects her personal history as a female immigrant. Nouri received her BA in Performance art and MA in Art and Design from Tehran Art University, and her PhD in Creativity from City University London, UK. Working across a variety of media, the artist mines her country’s tradition of storytelling, often turning to Persia’s philosophies and mysticism to contemplate and reconsider the complexities which she bears witness to in the contemporary moment. |
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Learning Palestine: Until Liberation Southern Exposure JUNE 22 & 23 - 10am to 10pm Two 12-hour listening sessions Organized by Southern Exposure, Arab.AMP, and Leyya Mona Tawil in partnership with Learning Palestine. Southern Exposure presents the second event in our Voices of Palestinian Futures series - two 12-hour radio programs, broadcast in our gallery 10 AM–10 PM on June 22 and 23, 2024. These long-form listening sessions were created by Learning Palestine. Gather with us to listen to their selection of songs, chants, lectures, interviews, conversations, and storytelling. These audio materials were collected from all around the world as an accumulation of resistance discourse against settler colonialism and imperial histories throughout this world, in the context of Palestinian liberation. Amidst the ongoing violence throughout Palestine, Southern Exposure renews our commitment to being a space for community to gather, connect, and learn together. SoEx’s gallery will be a contemplative space for listening, reflecting, and learning. Information tables, light refreshments, and seating will be provided. The gallery will be open for 12 hours each day, and attendees may come and go as they please and as their time allows. Come for 15 minutes, an hour, an evening, a day. We invite you to bring food or personal seating options that assist in your comfort. Artwork sourced from Flyers for Falastin by Annarita Costantini. |
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NOMADIC SIGNALS: JOURNEY FROM GAZA TO BROOKLYN
FEATURING HUDA ASFOUR & FARAH BARQAWI Fri 07 Jun, 2024, 6pm / ISSUE Project Room NYC CANCELLED Friday, June 7th at 6:30pm, ISSUE Project Room partners with Arab.AMP and 2020 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow (SFCF) Leyya Mona Tawil to present the sixth installment in her NOMADIC SIGNALS series, Journey From Gaza to Brooklyn, featuring composer Huda Asfour alongside poet and performer Farah Barqawi. |
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Nadah El Shazly + BINT + Camellia Boutros
BINT’s appearance on this program is co-presention between Arab.AMP & The Lab THE LAB SF March 12, 2024 BINT is a musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Creating across visual, performance and sound art, BINT applies contemporary methods to the traditional multicultural technologies of her ancestries (Pakistani, Egyptian, American, etc). With a focus on inherited metaphysical tech, her practice investigates the perennial role of the artist-mystic as cultural preserver and liberation worker. As a musician, BINT turns to a palette of dissonance, distortion, long-form drones, sampling and noise to access corresponding emotional states in herself and listeners–most known for her unusual approach to processed harmonium and multilingual vocals, through analog synthesis, pedals and cassette tape. In 2019, BINT released Katabasis: Act I, an EP applying dark ambient power electronics and Arabic mother tongue to her classical Hindustani vocal training. She has shown work internationally, including a wide range of commissions and collaborations, ranging from Black Sabbath to Joan La Barbara, and from the Copro Gallery to Coachella Music and Arts Festival. |
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Donia Jarrar's BUTCHER
Presented by Arab.AMP & Center for New Music March 23-24 2024 San Francisco Concept album and performance work by Dr. Donia Jarrar Bay Area collaborators / Christian McLaurin, Lara Aburamadan, Manan Kocher This hybrid opera is based on Jarrar’s own experiences with domestic violence, in which she takes on the persona of a vigilante and antihero doling out punishments through the power wielded to her via a sonic cleaver. BUTCHER combines grandiose piano solo pieces with songs written for bass and piano, synthesizer, and oral histories collected from established North African feminist figures and recontextualized in the current time. BUTCHER weaves a story of survival, strength, and Palestinian resistance through Jarrar’s first deep foray into songwriting, all while maintaining her signature incorporation of oral histories, field recordings and piano scores. This will be the Bay Area premiere of the work. |
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FREE PALESTINE String Quartets by John King In-person at the Arab American National Museum Purchase Tickets: $10 Members | $12 Student/Senior | $15 General FREE PALESTINE is an ongoing set of pieces employing Arabic pitch and rhythmic modes which explore sonic, structural and temporal freedoms. The pieces began being titled with the predominant maqam used. Then their titles changed to become the original historic names of Palestinian villages from the pre-1948 before the Nakbah. These ethnically cleansed villages are significant historically as well as for the current conditions of the ongoing Occupation and Siege. These names for me focus the resistance to the policies of Apartheid, the illegality of the Occupation, and the crimes perpetrated on the people who continue to resist in their steadfast fight for equal rights, equal justice, equal freedoms, and the right of return to their homeland. These villages, from the river to the sea, and their former and future inhabitants must always be acknowledged and kept in our memories. At the AANM, King’s compositions will be performed by The Entropy String Quartet featuring Maritza Figueroa-Garibay, Mike Khoury, Indira Edwards and Jack O’Brien. |
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AMP Folktales Ep. 13
Commissioned Artist: Alia Taqieddin Premiered January 27, 2024 From Alia/ @alia.ajnabia In her article, Palestine In the Digital Cloud, Dr. Hanine Shehadeh argues that by using digital media, Palestinians can articulate a “digital floating homeland,” where online they can create virtual communities of resistance. In the 21st century, Palestinians have been able to upload videos and voices and images and millions of digital bits onto an online platform that continually digitally reconstructs the homeland. Using found footage, this project serves to archive and repurpose raw audio testimony into an homage of our peoples’ voice. It is an attempt to virtually bridge the illusion of distance between Palestine on the ground, and Palestine across the world. This project intends to add to the growing body of digital media that upholds the “digital floating homeland.” My hope is that in the face of extreme censorship, this piece provides digital armor to the testimonies of the Palestinian people. May it be a sonic love letter to Gaza, to the sea, and to the steadfastness of the Palestinian struggle. |
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AMP 2024 Season is here!
5 New AMP Folktales Episodes featuring: Nadya Tannous’ Community Spotlights and commissioned artists Alia Taqieddin, بنت BINT, Dena Al-Adeeb, Mobina Nouri, and Thea Farhadian. AMP Live events include: *FREE PALESTINE quartets by John King at the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn) *BINT in partnership with The Lab, also featuring Nadah El Shazly & Camellia Boutros (SF) *Donia Jarrar’s BUTCHER in partnership with the Center for New Music (SF) We are also so happy to announce our new Arab.AMP RESIDENCY at the Arab American National Museum - our first artist-in-residence this September will be Ebti. |
2023
AMP FOLKTALES Episode Series
AMP LIVE & commissions
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Voices of Palestinian Futures
Wednesday, December 20, 2023 6:00–8:00 PM Southern Exposure - San Francisco A future for Palestine has never been closer or more imperiled. We are at an inflection point in the Palestinian story. Our story is finally being broadcast; but where are we going from here, and what shape does our liberation struggle take moving forward? Arab.AMP and Southern Exposure invite you into an artist-led conversation between Fadi Salah (poet/organizer), Manaar Azreik (voice/healing), Tarik Kazaleh (music/activism), and Lara Aburamadan (photography/journalism). Join us for this evening of discussion, sound medicine, live music, art making led by Sebastian Raphael, and a light reception. Organized by Southern Exposure, Arab.AMP, Leyya Mona Tawil, and Fadi Salah. This program is also supported in part by The Cedar Tree Project. |
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AMP Live presents Joseph Bohigian
Stone Dreams: An Interactive Sound Installation Thursday, June 29 – Saturday, July 1, 2023 Opening Reception on Thursday, June 29 “I can love a place I have never seen, a place that no longer exists, whose inhabitants have been killed.” —William Saroyan, “The Armenian & the Armenian” How is memory preserved when physical sites of memory are destroyed? When collective memory is separated from a place, how can it be revived in a new context? This stone acts as an instrument which brings forth fragments of Armenian folk songs collected by Mihran Toumajan in the United States in the 1930s. This act of remembering is an active response in the face of a century of imposed forgetting. The installation includes recordings of four songs collected by folklorist Mihran Toumajan as part of his effort to preserve the remnants of oral literature surviving in the Armenian diaspora post-genocide. |
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AMP Folktales Ep. #8 PREMIERES MARCH 25 Commissioned Artist: HASAN HUJAIRI We are so excited to launch our 2023 season with Hasan Hujairi's new work: Supreme Instruments of Power: Amusement Parks and Public Television (2023), an electroacoustic improvisation built on an oud improvisation in maqam Nahawand. The music is juxtaposed with footage connected to Bahrain: the reopening of an amusement park, an obscure discussion on the impact of George W. Bush's foreign policy, and a surrealist comedy from the 1990s. The connections between the sound and images may or may not be speculative and arbitrary in nature. Hasan Hujairi is an artist, composer, and researcher from Manama, Bahrain. His works explore the intersection between histories on the verge of loss, the conditionalities of music and art pedagogy, and the historiographies of outsider composers. @hasan.hujairi |
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AMP Folktales Ep. #8 PREMIERES MARCH 25 Community Spotlight: Deja Gould, Sogorea Te' AMP Folktales host Nadya Tannous is back! For Episode #1, Nadya interviews Deja Gould, the Chochenyo language keeper for the Lisjan Ohlone People. They met onsite at the recently rematriated lot on Ashby Ave, and discussed this recently released Land Back music video with RebelWise, featuring versus in Chochenyo that Deja wrote! |
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Arab.AMP Research Residency at TAC Artist Mohammadreza Akrami Momo enjoyed his research time at TAC in February. Born in Tehran, Mohammadreza is a dance artist based in Montreal and Toronto. His eagerness toward episteme leads him to study Physics, Dramatic literature, Contemporary dance and practicing martial arts. During his residency, he and collaborator Indrek Kornel are researching a new work that is an ontological investigation into agency. |
2022 season
AMP FOLKTALES 2022
AMP LIVE / EVENTS IN Oakland, Portland, NYC
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In partnership with
ISSUE Project Room & Brooklyn Academy of Music NOMADIC SIGNALS: THE SEAS FEATURING “A” TRIO Sat 14 May, 2022, 8pm Tickets 58 7th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 (Reception Entrance at Lincoln Place) Saturday, May 14th, ISSUE Project Room in partnership with the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and Arab.AMP are pleased to welcome 2020 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Leyya Tawil to present The Seas, her fifth program in the NOMADIC SIGNALS series. The program is an acoustic evening of improvisation featuring the US debut of Beirut-based ensemble “A” Trio, and Brooklyn-based percussionist Nava Dunkelman. |
2020-21 Season
Featuring a new Artist-in-residence program,
5 commissioned projects, and co-presentation with the
arab american national museum.
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JAM3A , an Arabic word for “gathering,” is a music and arts festival presented by the Arab American National Museum (AANM) , celebrating Arab talent, community and identity! Arab.AMP Director Leyya Tawil moderates the artist talk on Day 3 featuring Hello Psychaleppo, 47Soul, YallaPunk. SEP 25 at 7:30 EDT Free. Full schedule here. This night also features the premiere of new work by Lime Rickey International. Arab.AMP is a partner in this amazing 4-day virtual experience that will feature musical performances by renowned Arab artists and a curated virtual vendor market showcasing small artisan businesses. Presented in partnership with @arab.amp @downtowndearborn @umspresents @yallapunk |
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AMP Resident Artist Sholeh Asgary / Screening & “Majles” Panel moderated by Abou Farman
Sunday, 13 June 2021 1:00pm PDT PANEL ARCHIVE & WORKS ON VIEW JUNE 13-20, 2021 As a final synthesis to her AMP Residency research, Sholeh Asgary offers two video premieres and a “Majles” Panel with previous participants, moderated by Abou Farman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research (NYC), and participants from the Majles workshop series. Asgary will also screen “Watch” and “270,” two video and sound compositions that were created during her time at Temescal Art Center in the summer of 2020. |
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AMP 2020-2021 COMMISSIONING SERIES Web-based events, programs and gatherings - Free. AMP Commissions is supported by the California Arts Council and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. This season features experimental film by Mark Gergis (London), new video work by Amy Melissa Reed (Sacramento), performance lecture by Doris Bittar (Los Angeles) and the premiere of Extraterritorial صوت - a collaborative project by Leyya Mona Tawil, Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asgary, Daiane Lopes da Silva. Follow us @Arab.AMP for updates! |
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AMP Monthly Workshop Series with Resident Artist Sholeh Asgary THIRD THURSDAYS MONTHLY [Sep 2020 -June 2021] 7PM PST REGISTER HERE free, online, participatory SAVE THE DATE - Screening/Panel w. Sholeh - June 13 MAJLES Majles is a series of sound, silence and movement based workshops, audience participatory scores, and collective reflections that seek to build a new governance through individual creativity, in relationship to each other. Each Majles session convenes online the third Thursday of the month, and tends to be preceded or followed by a guided offering. |
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AMP Commissions / Doris Bittar Premiere Screening and Interview 28th March 2021 Watch the work and interview here. AMP Commissions presents "Colonial Colonnade" by Doris Bittar. Colonial Colonnade is a performative exploration to reconcile English and Arabic words as a streaming list of diasporic utterances beginning with the letter "c." The video pieces follow a hybridized pattern animation with Sound by Doris Bittar, Clarissa Bitar, Margarita Zulueta and a team of voices from the local Arab American community coordinate with performance improvisations. |
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AMP Commissions / Amy Melissa Reed Arab.AMP is excited to announce a commission for a video sound text score by transdisciplinary artist Amy Melissa Reed, premiering on Saturday, February 20th 2021 Watch it here. This work re-started in Spring 2020 with a collaboration with the home space: the garden, Amy's mother and family. It later grew to include collaborators via telematic and other platforms. Friends and colleagues who remained in communication during the global pandemic contributed to this work as we shared personal stories of loss, dreams, forgetting, losing a cat, and the neighbor's house burning down. |
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John King & Leyya Tawil / Gather for Gaza 21 Dec 2020 A special Arab.AMP / Gather for Gaza concert featuring the duo of John King and Leyya Tawil. UNRWA #GatherforGaza initiative supports education for the children in Gaza, specifically funding materials that make remote learning possible during this pandemic. Please donate if you can! https://getinvolved.unrwausa.org/fundraiser/3076822 |
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Extraterritorial صوت premieres on Friday December 4th 2020. The first of our Commissioned Projects! Extraterritorial صوت is a video work that proposes a feminist take on post-apocalypse ambitions. Collaborators Leyya Mona Tawil, Sholeh Asgary, Dena Al-Adeeb, and Daiane Lopes da Silva construct this work with sounds, images and choreographies that invoke territories inside/outside borders, bodies, and land. Please join us this Friday, December 4th for a Zoom pre-party from 5:00-6:00pm PST to hang out with the ELIXIR team and toast the process! Register for Premiere Party here |
