In artist Noor Abed's film, Palestinian tales are told through the landscape

Her work featuring women in acts of ritual and daily life tells the story of traditions

The land is a character in Noor Abed's 'our songs were ready for all wars to come', 2021. Photo: Noor Abed and Ikon Gallery

Two years ago, Noor Abed’s father asked her to come for a drive with him – he had something to show her, the artist recalls. He took her to an ancient abandoned complex in the village of Al Jib, a few kilometres from their home on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

“I saw that place and it just hit me,” Abed says. “I kept going, going, going and taking pictures, doing sketches and listening to the site. Then, later, I sat with two historians and I researched it. But first, I trusted my intuition.”

The complex became the site for Abed’s latest artwork, the film our songs were ready for all wars to come. It brings together footage of women in acts of ritual, daily life and enigmatic fury, all tied together by the chanting of Palestinian singer and composer Maya Khaldi.

After visiting the site with her father, Abed began to imagine the community that used to live in the area and the things they would have done. It occurred to her that the rites for death and mourning in Palestine are intimately connected to the land – in dances stomped on to the ground or chants that use mountains and the built environment to amplify their sound.

“Reading all these Palestinian folk tales, you sense how much the communities are aware of the landscape,” she explains. “In the way they describe the landscape, they really claim it. I wanted to create my own mythology of spaces, something that existed between fact and fiction.”

In the film, women dance in the rocky terrain. In the heat of the sun, two carry a body in a white shroud into a cavern. Khaldi crawls out of a well, chanting and keening, as if the ancient cistern was discharging one last anguished plea.

“I thought maybe we need to dig more underground and see what's there because what's happening on top is just cycles of repetition.”

Shot in grainy Super 8, the film feels out of time, as if these women could have been dancing, unseen, for hundreds of years.

“How do we create an image of daily life, rituals and communities – beyond the image of the fighter and the victim?” she asks. “The film performs a reverse anthropology. We don't have images of ourselves and I want to create an image from Palestine, about Palestine – not about Palestine from someone else.”

The film opens this weekend at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in the UK, and is one of a number of works through which the young artist investigates forms of local knowledge.

For Keeping Together in Time (2016), a commission by the Sharjah Art Foundation for its March Projects, Abed researched the history of the cannon that guards the city’s fort. Nicknamed “Al Raggas”, or “the dancing cannon”, a legend holds that the weapon would not fire during battle. Villagers, hoping to cajole it into action, sang and chanted for it, and the cannon discharged.

Abed persuaded the city to play recordings of Palestinians chanting for the cannon to fire, which echoed through Sharjah three times daily. Later, she made a series of dance notations that detailed the kind of movements that would have accompanied the chanting.

Her focus on the everyday means daily encounters are an important source of inspiration for her work. The unflinching video One Night Stand (2019), which she made with Mark Lotfy, examines militia recruitment strategies and was inspired by a conversation she had in Beirut, which she recorded – for her own protection – and later used as the basis for the script with Lofty.

The video leaves it unclear what group the man is recruiting for – and indeed if such a solicitation is even taking place, occupying that zone of uncertainty that was explored by the Arab Image Foundation and others in Beirut in the early 2000s.

In Surface, she examined the rumour of an unidentified creature that flew over the village of Bir Nabala in 2015, imagining a group of people viewed from the perspective of that object. Interpretations, of who said or saw what and when are kept fluid; Abed’s loyalties lie, one senses, with those who are paying close attention.

Since Abed left Palestine in 2013, she has travelled to some of the most respected programmes in the critical art world: CalArts in Los Angeles, where she did a masters in fine arts; the Whitney’s Independent Study Programme, the home of institutional critique in New York; and Beirut’s Ashkal Alwan, with its ambitious imbrication of art and politics.

Abed now lives in Kassel, Germany, where she is on the curatorial team for Documenta, assisting the Indonesian collective ruangrupa in putting together the exhibition, which takes place every five years.

Despite this impressive pedigree, she shies away from art-speak buzzwords, returning again to the importance of local, sited knowledge. It is a notion she has made concrete in a school she leads in Ramallah with curator Lara Khaldi.

The two created the School of Intrusions in 2019, in the form of roving, peer-led seminars. They put out an open call for artists, curators and art professionals, and the groups met in different sites around the city. In one session in a graveyard, the guard told them about the site’s local history; another was held near a shopping mall that was under construction, and participants discussed the lopsided economic development of Ramallah, in which shopping venues rather than schools and hospitals are being built.

“We don't have any institutional affiliation. We don't have budget or anything. We're not dependent on any funding,” she says.

“We’re a group of people who meet and every time we meet in different sites, and depending on the site, we raise the knowledge that comes from it. It’s about how to move and intrude in spaces without asking permission. Instead we are claiming it as ours – because it should be.”

Noor Abed’s our songs were ready for all wars to come is showing at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham until February 13, 2022