Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

The New York Arab Festival, in partnership with the historic East Village theater La Mama, are proud to present a series of digital art and video-performances exhibited from April 30th through May 8th. The exhibition explores the intersection of digital art with performance and performativity. It showcases the work of Ahmed El Shaer, Mey Seifan, Ichraq Bouzidi, and Fadl Fakhouri. Tucked into the theatre’s lobby, this exhibition offers a glimpse into the rich world of digital art by contemporary Arab artists, living in New York and beyond.

Join us for our Arab Fashion Meetup at Phebe’s, the East Village institution serving as a hub for artists since 1968. Arab and Arab American fashion designers and entrepreneurs will be meeting up to share their stories, upcoming news, and their design philosophies and entrepreneurial drive. Join Monzlapur, Ego Jasmine, and Layal.Land for a behind-the-scenes fashion moment.

Maurice Louca is a renowned, world-touring artist who combines electronic music, intense live guitar performance, complex instrumental arrangements, and powerful new jazz sounds to create dense, hypnotic, and transcendental concerts. Maurice is one of the most gifted, prolific, and adventurous musicians from Egypt, described most recently as a producer of ‘transcendent beauty in an unholy racket’.

Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

Curating performance from contemporary Arab artists is often met with extremes. Whether fetishism or rejection, orientalism or xenophobia, curating Arab performance evokes multiple challenges that this panel will tackle. Gathering scholars who are equally specialists working in the fields of curation, education, and production, the panel will look at notions of canon and fetishism as proposed by Ismail Fayed, will look at migration and culture policy through the work of Mey Seifan, and the necessity for developing new economic and entrepreneurial structures to advance radical performance curation through the work of Sarah El Miniawy.

Join us in an informal gathering around authentic food and drink at the NoLita outpost of the Egyptian street food restaurant Zooba, and enjoy conversations with artists and designers from the New York Arab Festival. Learn about upcoming projects, ask about their inspiration, and explore Egyptian food while learning about contemporary artistic practices from young Arab makers and creators.

NYAF presents Nadia Khayrallah’s “Improv Jam & Creative Meet Up,” a creative meet up and improv jam session for dancers, musicians, actors-who-move, and visual artists. The event will include guided movement as well as vocalizing and drawing exercises, followed by an open jam and discussion time.

How can artists, architects, and theorists from cities as diverse as New York, Cairo, and Riyadh mobilize public art to reclaim the commons? What promise - or peril - does digital art and Web3 pose to this collaboration? This panel discussion brings together artists, thinkers, creators, and policy-makers to ponder these questions and propose arts and culture as tools for rebuilding public sphere.

Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

In cities around the world, climate change is making visible the infrastructures that were once hidden. What is the role of art in this process? How can art hasten and clarify this infrastructural awakening? This panel discussion brings together artists, thinkers, creators, and policy-makers to explore what it would mean to truly embed artistry within the infrastructural networks that sustain us.

Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

The New York Arab Festival (NYAF) in partnership with The Invisible Dog Art Center presents a series of live performances for the inaugural edition of the festival, including visual artist Manar Abdelmaaboud, choreographer and dancer Nadia Khayrallah, the Brooklyn Maqam music collective, and the choreographer and dancer Esraa Warda with her music band. An iftar meal will be provided at sunset.

Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

Khalid Abdel-Hadi, a Jordanian-Palestinian artist, curator, and activist, is founder of “MyKali”, a SWANA-region, conceptual, queer/feminist/intersectional webzine launched in 2007. During this conversation, Khalid Abdel-Hadi will discuss working outside of institutionalized structures, as well as curatorial practices in the Arab diaspora.

Batta and Badreyya take a trip to Mars, to share ancient recipes with aliens, and exchange food cultures, meeting cinema and television stars along the way. Join Ahmad Abokamar and Lamia Gouda on their intergalactic voyage, designed for TikTok by Harshini Karunaratne, art direction by Kareem El Hayawan, music by Mostafa Sobhy, produced by Wizara and directed by Adham Hafez

In this series of works comprising several images and animated short loops, Ahmed El Shaer collaborates with Artificial Intelligence to explore questions on the afterlife, and how a machine imagines the metaphysical and the transcendental. All images produced through generative technologies, the final artistic works are fully created by machine intelligence, without the artist’s interference. A radical experiment in what Islamic Art could look like in the 21st century, away from stereotypical expectations and orientalist images. ‘AI Heaven’ is alluring, and terrifying. The images play with our perception, unsettling our expectation of form and meaning, as we stare into these works, created by a nonhuman agent.

Ya Ghorbati is an invitation to a musical journey across North Africa to discover the stories of Judeo-Arab divas from the early twentieth century through the 1960s. In it, singer Laura Elkeslassy excavates songs by Line Monty, Zohra Elfassia, Hbiba Msika, Salim Halali and more, recreating the musical soundscape of her family’s history in Morocco. In the process, she comes face to face with forgotten ancestors and reclaims her true family name as her artist name.

'A Prophet in the City', is a geotagged audio-performance developed by artist Lamia Gouda, and commissioned by RASEEF Program. Lamia Gouda reflects on the rich Arab history of New York, in the early 20th century, through the stories of Arab poets as they resonate in the works of Lebanese-American visual artist and poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran. The performances are tagged to locations in the West Village in New York City, creating a sonic-monument that reminds us of the absent history of the Arab poets and artists who lived in Manhattan, a hundred years ago. Audiences are invited to arrive at 51 West 10th Street, the address that used to be Gibran’s last house in New York. The first GPS tag starts there, and through SonicMaps (available both in the app or browser version), the audiences will follow the maps through Lamia Gouda’s haunting voice.