Cinematic Performance / “3 x 1001 (Nights),” with Nina Katchadourian, Tom McCarthy, and Rasha Salti

Date: Saturday, 23 March 2019, 8–10 pm
Location: Grüner Salon, Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz, Berlin
Tickets: 8 euros; available here

Co-organized with VariaVision at Volksbühne, Rasha Salti, and Christoph Terhechte

This evening of semi-improvised narration and music revives the increasingly rare tradition of live cinematic storytelling, once prevalent in countries as diverse as Japan, Korea, Senegal, Morocco, and Germany. Three performers will each devise a tale to accompany a scene from three different film versions of Thousand and One Nights, bringing to life the stories’ foundational figuring of narration, love, and death.

About the Contributors
Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. In recent years, her work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale (2015), MoMA PS1 (2016), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017). A solo survey exhibition of her work, entitled “Curiouser,” traveled to three museums in the United States over 2017–2018. Katchadourian splits her time between New York, where she is on the faculty of New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study, and Berlin.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third novel, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He contributes regularly to publications such as the New York Times, London Review of Books, Harper’s, and Artforum. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University. McCarthy was one of the judges of the 2018 Turner Prize.

Rasha Salti is an independent film and visual arts curator and writer, working and living between Beirut and Berlin. In 2011, she was one of the co-curators of the tenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial for the Arts, and in 2015, together with Kristine Khouri, she co-curated the exhibition “Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the Exhibition of International Art for Palestine (Beirut, 1978)” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona; the show was exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin the following year.