Ibraaz

Ibraaz A brave space for art, culture & ideas from the Global Majority | 📍 93 Mortimer Street, London, W1W 7SS

17/06/2026

🎬 Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) recounts the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by Western African immigrant workers living in workers’ residences in France. The story of this improbable, utopian return to the homeland follows a winding path that travels through the ecological challenges and conflicts on the African continent from the 1970s to the present day.

To tell this story, Bouba Touré, one of its principal actors, returns to the heart of his personal archives. They document peasant struggles in France and Mali, as well as following the personal stories of migrant workers over many decades. Furthermore, the film is a story of transmission, kinship and cinematographic geographies. Throughout the film, voices come to accompany Bouba Touré and bring forth the narrative of a forgotten memory leading towards the future.

by Raphaël Grisey () and Bouba Touré. The film is also available to watch on

🗓️🕰️ Sun 28 Jun, 3pm

🎟️🔗 Free tickets available via the link in bio.

🎬 On Sun 28 June, watch Raphaël Grisey (Raphaël Grisey) and Bouba Touré’s Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) in our Minassa...
15/06/2026

🎬 On Sun 28 June, watch Raphaël Grisey (Raphaël Grisey) and Bouba Touré’s Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) in our Minassa from 3pm.

Using rare cinematic, photographic and sound archives, Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) recounts the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by Western African immigrant workers living in workers’ residences in France. The story of this improbable, utopian return to the homeland follows a winding path that travels through the ecological challenges and conflicts on the African continent from the 1970s to the present day. To tell this story, Bouba Touré, one of its principal actors, returns to the heart of his personal archives. They document peasant struggles in France and Mali, as well as following the personal stories of migrant workers over many decades. Furthermore, the film is a story of transmission, kinship and cinematographic geographies. Throughout the film, voices come to accompany Bouba Touré and bring forth the narrative of a forgotten memory leading towards the future.

🎟️🔗 Free tickets and more info about the filmmakers via the link in our bio.

This film is also available to watch through via our partner Cinelogue’s (CINELOGUE) platform.

🗣️ Join us on Wed 24 Jun at 6pm for the next in the Contemplative Dialogues series — this time brought together by elect...
15/06/2026

🗣️ Join us on Wed 24 Jun at 6pm for the next in the Contemplative Dialogues series — this time brought together by electronic musician and artist-composer Nkisi (Me Li Ka) and our Library-in-Residence The Otolith Collective (Otolithians).

When we listen to musicians, composers, and producers speak about the music that has informed their thinking, past and present, we hear insights into their sonic ways of knowing the world.

More than aesthetic reference points, these insights reveal listening as a method, as tonal coordinates, as a situated, embodied, critically informed genesis of thought. What we hear are genealogies of ideas in sound, musical itineraries that shape the ways in which artists navigate history, politics, memory and relation.

The Contemplative Dialogues series engages with these genealogies as sites of inquiry. It attends to the ways in which acoustic epistemologies attune contemporary practice. It treats listening as analytic, speculative, and world-making.

Through a selection of possession music, ritual sound practices, diasporic rhythms, noise, and experimental electronics, brought together by electronic musician and artist-composer Nkisi, Contemplative Dialogue 4 reflects on the unpredictable ways rhythms travel through migration, rupture, ecstatic states, and machines.

Moving through a fractal rather than linear lineage of sound, this session brings together tracks that have shaped ways of listening and thinking about music while exploring ideas of confiscated rhythms: sonic forms historically demonised, criminalised, or treated with anxiety by colonial and oppressive systems. It asks: what happens when we stop understanding sound as an object made by humans and instead understand humans as temporary vessels through which sound travels?

🎟️🔗 Free tickets available via the link in bio.

🎬 This Sunday, watch two films exploring mutual struggle against coloniality, extraction and exploitation by Suneil Sanz...
11/06/2026

🎬 This Sunday, watch two films exploring mutual struggle against coloniality, extraction and exploitation by Suneil Sanzgiri (Suneil Sanzgiri) at Ibraaz from 3pm in our Minassa.

The first film, Two Refusals (Would We Recognise Ourselves Unbroken?) is told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives. A blend of CGI, 16mm film, hand-processed and destroyed archive lost layers of worldbuilding and kinship uncover solidarity between India and Africa underneath Portuguese Colonial rule.

The second, Golden Jubilee, is the third in a series films about memory, diaspora and coloniality. The film takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.

🔗🎟️ Free tickets available via the link in bio.

📷 Stills from both films courtesy the artist, Suneil Sanzgiri.

LUX

🎬 This Sunday, join us in our Minassa for a screening of two films by Suneil Sanzgiri from 3pm.Two Refusals (Would We Re...
10/06/2026

🎬 This Sunday, join us in our Minassa for a screening of two films by Suneil Sanzgiri from 3pm.

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) is an experimental film focusing on interwoven narratives around the mutual struggle against Portuguese colonialism between India and Africa and the bonds of solidarity that developed between the two continents. Told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives, Two Refusals utilizes a blend of CGI animation, super 16mm film, hand-processed and destroyed archival film to uncover lost layers of world-building, kinship, and the material and immaterial network of relations that developed between historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.

Golden Jubilee, the third film in a series of works about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.

🔗🎟️ Free tickets available via the link in bio.

📷 Stills courtesy of the artist, copyright Suneil Sanzgiri.

🎬 🎶 Join us on Sat 27 June for two special events by Syrian Cassette Archives () — a screening of Salamiyah, Lady of the...
10/06/2026

🎬 🎶 Join us on Sat 27 June for two special events by Syrian Cassette Archives () — a screening of Salamiyah, Lady of the Land at 1pm and a musical performance by the founders of Syrian Cassette Archives, Mark Gergis () & Yamen Mekdad (.yamen) at 7pm.

🔗🎟️ Please note: free tickets for both events must be booked separately via the link in bio.

Syrian Cassette Archives preserves, researches, and shares sounds and stories from Syria's cassette era (1970s-2010). During this period, the cassette was the de facto medium for music across the country, giving voice to regional folk and shaabi artists, wedding performers, and singers from communities who had no other means of recording or distributing their work. Much of this music circulated outside official institutions, state media, and formal archives.

Across a film screening and performance, this day brings together musical networks by which cassettes are created, listened to, and cared for. Please note that tickets for both parts of this event must be booked separately below.

Salamiyah, Lady of the Land (2026), is a documentary reportage on the sonic heritage of Salamiyah, a city with a deep-rooted musical heritage. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker. The evening performance draws on the archive, foregrounding the continuous growth of the project's scope and expanding how we can interact with and understand the collection.

Founded in 2018 and led by Mark Gergis and Yamen Mekdad from London and Damascus, SCA continues to expand through field research, digitisation, oral history interviews, and public events inside Syria and across the diaspora. The collection is freely accessible online in Arabic and English.

On Sat 20 Jun from 3pm, join co-editors Eva Bentcheva (), Annie Jael Kwan (), and Ming Tiampo () for the London launch o...
08/06/2026

On Sat 20 Jun from 3pm, join co-editors Eva Bentcheva (), Annie Jael Kwan (), and Ming Tiampo () for the London launch of Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking (ICI Berlin Press, 2026), a collaboration between Asia Forum () and the Worlding Public Cultures project.

Bringing together art-historical inquiry, theoretical reflections, and first-hand perspectives from artists, curators, and activists, the book draws on practices of collectivity from East and Southeast Asia. It asks how we can discuss collaboration, community-building, joint publishing and knowledge-making beyond Euro-American frameworks.

The editors will share a toolbox of strategies drawn from the book's research, and guide participants through a collective exercise designed to test, extend, and world its findings. This is an invitation to think not only about collectives, but as one, with all its rich, messy, and hopeful multiplicities.

🎟️🔗 Link to free tickets in bio.

📷 Image — Mai Ling, still from Becoming Stickiness (2023)

📖 〰️ Our Burley Fisher () x PalFest () Maktaba book of the month for June is Floodlines by Saleem Haddad, coinciding wit...
04/06/2026

📖 〰️ Our Burley Fisher () x PalFest () Maktaba book of the month for June is Floodlines by Saleem Haddad, coinciding with the release of the PalFest podcast recording of Saleem and Tareq Baconi's conversation at Ibraaz in February.

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad (Europa Editions), £14.99

In this hotly-anticipated follow-up to his debut novel Guapa, Saleem Haddad continues to push boundaries and refuse borders. Looking to the legacy of Arab modernism in visual arts, Floodlines reinvents stream of consciousness for the doomscrolling and dating app era. Nizar, a burned-out war correspondent mourning the end of a long relationship with his partner Alfie, finds himself absorbing and absorbed by the overwhelm of the moment and the equal overwhelm of family history and legacy, when his mother Zainab asks him to return to Iraq, where he is charged with unpicking the multiple histories - familial and political - of his grandfather's paintings. As Layla AlAmmar writes of the book for Markaz Review: "in Floodlines, it is art that ultimately binds the family, for better or for worse. Art is also what binds us to ourselves, especially in these times of profound Arab grief. In the face of the precarious and unpredictable, when we feel defeated and weak, human beings maintain an extraordinary capacity for expression."

Europa Editions is an independent publisher with a strong focus on bringing global literatures into English. It was started in 2005 by Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, who are also the owners and co-publishers of the Italian press, Edizioni E/O. Europa are also the publishers of two Maktaba favourites, Asmaa Alghoul's A Rebel in Gaza (with Sélim Nassib, translated by Mike Mitchell) and Emanuela Anechoum's Tangerinn.

📖 Pop in to the Maktaba Wed—Sun, 11am—6pm to grab your copy.

🗣️ Join us on Wed 17 June for The World Overheard 2 by Translator Magazine (). A panel of climate journalists asks how t...
02/06/2026

🗣️ Join us on Wed 17 June for The World Overheard 2 by Translator Magazine (). A panel of climate journalists asks how translation might help build a global consciousness of interlinked crises and surface the often systemic connections between local and global stories.

Speakers include Najlah Ben Salah, and Alžběta Medková, Michal Špína and Damien Gayle, joining remotely, with Karen Gray joining in person. The conversation will be moderated by Charles Emmerson.

Translator has published translations of climate journalism from different angles and different parts of the world: from penguin massacres in Patagonia to phosphate dumping in the Gulf of Gabès to lithium mining in Serbia. The same planet, radically different stories. Together, these works show how ecological crisis is never one story, shifting entirely depending on where you stand.

The World Overheard is a series of conversations about journalism, translation, and power, developed by Translator – an independent magazine of translated journalism and non-fiction from beyond the Anglosphere – in dialogue with Ibraaz.

🎟️🔗 Free tickets available via the link in bio.

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