What does it mean to gather around grief, and what forms of care become possible when we do? hidden love in pockets of grief brings audiences together through sonic and performative translations of loss, defeat, and more-than-human forms of care. Over the course of the evening, research, performance, and collective activation trace how grief moves through bodies, histories, and ecological systems – from the marshlands of southern Iraq to the adaptive intelligence of mangrove forests.

The programme opens with Ameneh Solati’s presentation In The Mesopotamian Marshes: Tracing Ecocide in Iraq’s Rural Wetland, introducing the research behind her installation Might Water Grieve?, followed by a Q&A. Solati outlines how the marshlands emerge as sites where political and social power is both contested and reproduced, tracing the near-total drainage of the wetlands in 1991 and its devastating impact on Indigenous communities and multispecies life.

This is followed by Mohamed Abdelkarim’s In Which They Will Remain Forever, a thirty-minute audiovisual performance that meditates on memory, futurity, and interminable defeat in post-revolutionary Cairo. Working with footage from 2012, poetry, testimony, and live sound, Abdelkarim moves through the incomprehension left by history, offering gestures of ritualised commemoration and repetition to confront what continues to haunt the city.

The evening concludes with HUNITI GOLDOX’s How to Love…, a performative activation of the installation Mangrove Intelligence, presented as part of the exhibition. Drawing from the interdependent survival strategies of mangrove forests, the work proposes ecological systems as models for rethinking human relations amid fragmentation, individualism, and algorithmic governance. Through a score of prompts and responses, the performance enacts a collective intelligence that foregrounds hesitation, multiplicity, and vulnerability – positioning love as a methodology of connection and a practice of unlearning domination.

This programme is part of the Biennial Exhibition taking place at Arti et Amicitiae – where HUNITI GOLDOX and Ameneh Solati’s work is on view.