Thursday, February 6th at 8pm, ISSUE invites audiences to the 22 Boerum Pl. theater to experience new projects by multidisciplinary artists Leila Hassan and Selwa Abd (Bergsonist).

In her American debut, Leila Hassan presented Sea Urchin at ISSUE in 2018. The “odd dub” collaborative project with Italian artist Francesco Cavaliere explored musical relations with objects, writings and textiles. Hassan's newest installation, hydro phōnḗ, weaves together audiovisual elements and linguistic play, drawing from the ancient Greek words hydro (water) and phōnḗ (voice or sound). This fusion investigates the connection between language and water, inviting the listener to consider the meaning carried by water’s sound.

After discovering the Sea Urchin project in 2019, Selwa Abd invited the artists to contribute to a compilation created for her platform, Bizaarbazaar. The compilation featured 40 tracks centered around the themes of “Sonic Fragment” and “Rhythmic Weaponry,” inspiring the start of their relationship. Abd’s Bergsonist project adopts an intuitive and fragment-based creative approach, drawing inspiration from the works of postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. She is interested in building worlds (sonic and visual) as simulations set up for extending creative research and speculations on the future that awaits us. Bergsonist returns to ISSUE this February with a new iteration of As If Reality?, a multimodal work-in-progress series first presented during her 2022 residency in collaboration with Harvestworks (and more recently recontextualized in Norway, last October).