Preema Nazia Andaleeb at the performance art festival “Re-rooting Tallaght”, Ireland
Nazia Andaleeb Preema a prolific thinker, leader and avant-garde Bangladesh born artist who provokes mind through her ground breaking ideas, performances, and creativity. She is constantly challenges the stereo typical notions of human behavioral limitations. She is a also an activist, writer, singer and entrepreneur who currently resides in United Kingdom and pursuing her creative endeavor all over the world.
As the French philosopher Derrida discovered there is always some hostility in hospitality, a reference to the pre-conditions that are in place when welcoming a stranger into your environment. I can truly connect with the fact and be in a new country, workplace, cultural institution or home. We are constantly creating a new community by inviting new culture, idea to help building a global community as a whole.
‘Re-rooting’ performance art festival in Dublin invited me to perform to reimagine and approach something in a new way, whether through different techniques or in a different setting to explore spaces through body of works combining it’s history, present development and contemporary ideas. Tallaght (a village turns into a city), a small town of Dublin, continues to evolve, me a visiting artist, finds deep inspiration in both its history and its dynamic present.
The festival started from 25 till 28 September 2024, curated by Lauren Kelly and Paul Regan. Diverse, multifaceted artists like Venus Patel, Wioletta Ratajczak, Tuaq Sarraj, Fergus Byrne, Aine Philips, Alastair Maclennam, Deej Fabyc and myself performance in different context around Tallaght. Everyone has their own style of representational genre that responded on Tallaght’s ongoing transformation, ensuring that these new narratives were woven into the fabric of its cultural legacy. The curated artists were to explore on stories of belonging and displacement, enriched by the experiences of refugees who have recently joined the community.
I choose the histirical St. Maelruain’s font and the graveyard to explore the complex nature of human action using body as metaphoric gesture and the evolving identity. The gesture depicts the juxtaposition of two different cultures (Asian and European) that are influenced by many narratives over the years. The amalgamation of religious discourses and historical politics has an interesting impact on both the cultures as a paradox.
My performance “Luncheon in the Graveyard” is an invitation to relate the relationship between a morbid graveyard with the lively presence of human body. Using my body movements, actions, text, dialogues through voice improvisation to perpetual my connections with the construction of the graveyard. Uncertain weather with heavy rain and cold atmosphere were an extra addition to navigate my performance in an intense dimension to make it even more organic and a proof of the impermanence of our fleeting body. My performance investigated the concept of death which seems illusive and that’s the reason it stands alone in isolation like any human body.
As Artist Paul Murnaghan describes, “She dances slowly while singing a soft melody, then on her hands and knees, moving in a flowing motion, interacting with nature, caressing trees, leaves, and branches. Her dance movements look somewhat exotic, her hands are expressive, sensual. She removes the black veil and walks towards a raised flat tomb. A glass and a bottle of wine are in place on the tombstone. She sings some words lost in the wind and sits in front of it. She speaks, “He left and he never came back”, in English and then in what seems to be Bangladeshi. She repeats this many times. She rolls on top of a broken grave, hard wet rock against skin, after a while she sits firmly on the grave and stares out at the crowd, looking stern, no longer lost in reverie. She lays a banana on a stone and cuts it into several small pieces. She takes the food into an ancient hollowed out stone.”
Surrounded by many ancient graves where I could easily embrace my soul was awakening by the mystical aura of unknown entities. I started talking with my long departed dad, who passed away a long time back, as him I met him suddenly in the graveyard. His smell I could feel while I was writing i letter to him on Fergus’s performance note. Bottle of red wine and the empty glass was the symbol of our impermanence in this fleeting world. Then I suddenly heard something mischievous, as if, someone was calling my name. I looked around and no one was there; so I started crawling on the ground and after sometime I got stumbled by a stubborn rock.
While embracing an old tree, rough bark on skin, I murmured, “Dust in my eye” and moves through the graveyard and people follow me onwards.
There are other foods and objects on a silver tray and a small branch. I made percussive sounds with four silver balls. It mixes with the sound of the rain which is hitting the audience. I lifted up the tray, puts food on a fork and feeds some of the audience. The food is a deep red color, I threw the last of it in the air as it took a long twig which may be a herb of some sort and flogs her chest. Next scratches a rock on the surface of the stone bowl while speaking my Bangla language. I lifted the tray and bangs it with a fork, like a warning or a bell calling to a congregation. At the same time, the church bell rings. I stared licking the tray all over, sits and starts to turn a small branch in circles while humming that same melody, all of my concentration on this action, like none no longer there and neither I am.
Venus Patel were taking the closure of the Jacob’s Biscuit Factory and its over haul by the Amazon Data Centre, she has lost the life and the community she once had and her performance about to finding a way to exist within a space that has pursuit her out to rebuild a world without the hierarchy of capitalism within a new community of coexists.
In her performance, artist Wioletta was searching for Oisin, a historical tragic character who returned to Ireland from the land of youth after three hundred years. She uses her sculptures and elements to represent the cultural dichotomy of polish and Irish as to define her identity using her research on the phenomena of “culture shock”.
Artist Tuqa was involved in a three hours long performance on finding Arabic in Ireland Series as the Linguistic tapestry. By this meditational performance she was continuously creating alphabets using plates of different shapes and sizes that signifies the diverse letters and words of two different cultures.
It was drizzling and windy, Fergus were narrating a story loudly enough to hear by the trees and the breeze while mopping the soil. He narrated quotes from the books as mantra along with his physical actions while cutting the dead tree trucks to carry them to bring to life and disappear as he jump from the wall, suddenly and surprisingly.
Aine Philips was the bag lady accompanied by Wiolata to identify the homelessness that going on in where is witnessed , San Francisco. Carrying big black plastic bags on her back and in the trolley was to demonstrate the evidence of kinetic ways of living where people don’t have shelter in a wealthy world.
Alastair, wearing his Zen, decorative attire holding many words and rituals standing and walking on the crossroads. He was there in different zones, facing variety of audiences around bus stands and road crossing. He intersect his Zen practice and interlinks mind and body at the same time through his enigmatic slow movements.
Deej, wearing shocking pick cosmopolitan attire appeared in dashing style posing around the van. She grabbed audiences one by one and put them inside the black vehicle. The film was going on the screen inside on drugs and dopamine and the viewers had no choice but to witnessed the reality of death by overdosing that took place as accident and ended up in a mental hospital.
Performance art is about people and about our society, surroundings, as seen through the body, actions of the performer/artist. We are constantly under the process of uprooting and re-rooting – either by choice or by circumstances. Because it is very important to break up our own pattern of life itself and hence it is the most contemporary form of art where artist body is an art itself.
