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Watch newly commissioned pieces and key works from FVU's past projects.
Bani Abidi
The Song (2022)
We’re excited to be re-presenting Bani Abidi’s 2022 FVU-commissioned work The Song on #FVUWatch this month. Presented by Contemporary Art Society to Gallery Oldham, The Song has exhibited and screened nationally and internationally since it’s release — and is available for free on our website for a limited time only!
If the past is a foreign country, the future is an equally strange, uncertain land. Exiled from a place of memory, people often try their best to recreate it in the present, to keep the anxiety of the future at bay. The desire is especially profound for the refugee or asylum seeker who has been violently uprooted from their homeland and has lost everything they held dear or kept near. The Song draws on Bani Abidi’s interest in sound and migration, and on what it means to be acoustically displaced. An older man, who is a recent arrival to Europe, confronts the silence of his allotted Berlin apartment, finding his own way to settle down.
In this specially commissioned text to accompany The Song, novelist Kamila Shamsie picks up the bitter-sweet refrain of the film and visits its protagonist some years into the future. Read HERE.
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