Farah Saleh's PAST-inuous and Gesturing Refugees @ Edinburgh Fruitmarket Warehouse • reviewsphere

The Fruitmarket presents three days of performances by Palestinian dance artist Farah Saleh in the Warehouse from 27 April–29 April.

It will see Saleh return to the Fruitmarket three years after her performance What My Body Can/t Remember was shown in 2019, and ahead of premiering her new work A Wee Journey at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2022 in collaboration with composer Oğuz Kaplangi.

The Warehouse is a new space for art in Edinburgh that lends itself to performance. Pre-viously, the Fruitmarket looked for opportunities to show live art, performance and music in the galleries, squeezing in projects between installations and deinstallations, or within exhibitions.

It is with pleasure that Saleh is welcomed back to the Fruitmarket and to the Warehouse for the first time with two performances and an ‘in conversation’ event that will engage with the depth of Saleh’s research into archiving stories of refugeehood.

PAST-inuous is a new live interactive dance performance with an in-person and digital cast of 11 Palestinian dancers, created in collaboration with video artist Lucas Chih-Peng Kao. It explores the bodies of the artists as living archives and aspires to reflect on the fu-ture of the Palestinian refugee cause and its connection to the current global refugee condition.

It follows its premiere at Dance International Festival (DIG) at Tramway in Glasgow and Dundee Rep, and will be presented in companion with Gesturing Refugees, an interac-tive dance performance which premiered at Avignon Festival in 2018 and uses the bod-ies of refugee artists and the audience as the main archive, while playing with other ar-chive material, testimonies and imagination.

These performances will be accompanied by an in conversation between Saleh and col-laborator Claricia Parinussa, an interdisciplinary artist with a body-based practice that en-capsulates movement, performance, research, writing, producing and community organis-ing.

Talking about presenting their work at the Fruitmarket, Farah Saleh said:

I am delighted to be taking PAST-inuous to the Fruitmarket Gallery, pairing it alongside Gesturing Refugees in a showing of my work that closes with a talk in the space with Claricia Parinussa. It’s brilliant to be continuing the relationship with the gallery and to be returning following the performance of What My Body Can/t Remember in 2019. It devel-ops my artistic practice and allows me to keep investigating how bodily archives, or our embodied knowledge, can be shared with audiences within a live performance setting.

I am really excited to see how PAST-inuous can transform from an interactive dance video into a live performance, through which the dancers performing from 4 different locations can interact directly with the audience. This also comes at a time when artists are trying to find hybrid ways to work both digitally and live, continuing the potentiality of the digital as a way to defy distance and tackle refugeehood. ~ Farah Saleh