“In Mahmoud Darwish’s journals, a river laughs to the revellers on its banks before its mother is kidnapped and it dies, slowly, of thirst.”

The laugh is not ironic. It is what the river was doing when it was alive. That the laughter and the dying coexist in the same poem is not a paradox Darwish resolves - it is the condition he is recording.

This exhibition takes its name from that world. Four artists, all working in and through Philadelphia, making work that holds more than one truth at once - about place, about myth, about what remains when official narratives run dry.

sāgar kāmath’s

American Dream Series is the most direct confrontation: with the myth, with the capitalism underneath it, with the bodies the Dream uses up and throws away. The pigments are Indigo and Cochineal - the dyes of the flag itself, with their own histories of extraction.

Alexei Mansour

builds a house where two homes exist at once - a bowl of pistachios, his mother’s voice on tape, objects and arrangements that carry both Lebanon and America in the same gesture. With Lebanon again under bombardment, actively supported by the country where Pittsburgh sits, the transnational façades press against each other.

Shehrezad Maher’s

The Curfew moves through the silence between a young man and his grandmother - the colonial past not as history but as the thing that shapes how he sees a stranger, how he sees himself.

Mir Masud-Elias’s

installation WHY ARE WE HERE NOW? draws from her manuscript In/Finite Body. Fragments of her poems line the wall above a writing desk where visitors are invited to sit and respond - to a prompt, a question, a silence. The prompts are not gentle: Where will you go when you can’t stay here? First they came for… What a visitor writes, they leave. What they take is one of 108 origami boats, each signed by Mir. At the opening, Philadelphia singer-songwriter Sophia Pradhan, who performs as Doozyah, will perform Second Body Problem - a poem in parts by Mir, set to her composition.

This exhibition, made with my 12G team for ArtPhilly’s marking of America’s 250th year, is not a commemoration. It is a record - of what was laughing, of what was lost, of what is still being made.

- Atif Sheikh, Twelve Gates Arts