Keeping Them Othered
Keeping Them Othered brings together installation, moving image, sound, text, and immersive media to examine political violence, inherited trauma, displacement, and the unstable architectures through which memory and power are produced. The works explore how histories of colonialism, occupation, and collective trauma persist—not as isolated events, but as recurring structures that continue to shape perception, emotion, and everyday life.
At the centre of the exhibition is You Never Know When It Will Explode, an immersive virtual reality film developed through an ongoing dialogue with Palestinian writer and journalist Qasem Waleed.
The research extends into site-responsive forms, including Somatic Ceremony, a sound performance by Helga Fannon and Haroon Mirza enacted at the Palmhouse of the Old Botanical Garden in Zurich. Sound vibrations moved Syrian rue seeds, translating acoustics into visible patterns and connecting plant life, bodies, ancestral knowledge, and the histories embedded within botanical practices. The performance reflects on the criminalisation of ancestral plants and the severing of people from land, traditions, and inherited knowledge.
You Never Know When It Will Explode was part-funded by Arts Council England and is available to experience in VR upon request.