210 canal st, rm 310, new york, ny
6 / fatemeh kazemi & zelikha zohra shoja: mūshtūk: a performance for two mortars, bread, water, and a dispersed body
june 24 , 6.15-7.15pm
outlines for a dispersed commons
performative gathering
beginning from the politics and poetics of hospitality, 𝙢ū𝙨𝙝𝙩ū𝙠 is a performative gathering that explores food as a material archive of migration, famine, kinship, displacement, and survival. “𝙢ū𝙨𝙝𝙩ū𝙠” stands for a modest food whose name may be understood as “that which fits inside a fist.”
the work emerges through an ongoing conversation between 𝗸𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗺𝗶 and 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗷𝗮, developed across months of exchange shaped by distance, interruption, and movement between locations. rather than presenting a fixed research outcome, the project approaches conversation itself as a method: stories, rumors, confessions, recipes, and observations accumulate through companionship, forming a shared field of study.
at the center of the performance are the hāvān (mortar and pestle), one of the oldest food technologies still in use across southwest and central asia, and dry bread, for which drying has long functioned as a technology of preservation across geographies shaped by drought, sanctions, war, displacement, and famine.
the performance asks what forms of intimacy remain possible under conditions of restricted movement, and how companionship can operate in spite of it.
𝗳𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗵 𝗸𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗺𝗶 (she/they, b. 1992, tehran), also known as afimoh, is an artist, researcher, and host whose practice moves between artistic research, fiction writing, moving image, material fabrication, and collective forms of gathering.
𝘇𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗵𝗮 𝘇𝗼𝗵𝗿𝗮 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗷𝗮 is an artist, researcher, and غمخوار / grief-eater living and working on unceded Onondaga land (syracuse, new york).
ⓒ gmtc 2025