Nasrin Himada and Yantong Li’s moving letter exchange takes us through the constellations of mourning unseen by colonial regimes that deny peace to numerous deceased kins.

Two short vignettes that reflect a safety found in writing by writer and curator Nasrin Himada. The first, oriented around the plot of the film Desert Hearts (1985), examines revenge fantasies and writing as a space to process and release. The latter is a childhood memory of unease.

How do we locate ourselves in our current place when our ethnic origins belong to a country we have never been? Nasrin Hamada explores the impossibility of articulating in words her diasporic experience. She asks for a poetry expressed by the body, the power of which will allow us to move beyond the conventional object/subject means of representation. For Hamada, Palestine is a “positioning”, a physical reminder of where she comes from. It is not a question – political or otherwise, but a place of lived experience that inhabits her body and that releases itself through her poetry.