Performance – Nothing Will Remain Other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World – Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian

On September 6, opening day of the 36th Bienal, the performance Nothing Will Remain Other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World by Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian will take place. The event will be held from 3 pm to 4 pm in the Auditorium on the third floor.

Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian enact a score composed of sound, text, and movement. Through a series of guttural sounds, gasps, coughs, hums, hisses the pair organise the central themes of the text through various parts of their noses, mouths, larynxes, tracheae and lungs, each organ embodying and introducing a series of affective and textual registers.

In an ongoing correspondence, the pair continues to exchange reflections, quotidian anecdotes, readings, poems, recordings of songs and recitations. The performance acts as an active labour of selecting, remembering, re-enacting, restructuring, reassessing, and reassembling elements from the correspondence, as a way to grapple with a heightened historical moment characterised by a peak in the constant hum of genocidal violence that has structured the artists’ respective trajectories.

Periodically prompting spectators to join in the sonic experience, the pair attempt to create a space of synchrony and action, where the audience becomes a resonance chamber traveled by vibration and transformed into a disparate choir.

The Performance was initially commissioned by Mophradat for Read the Room Festival, Kaaitheatre, Brussels 2024.

Noor Abed (1988, Jerusalem. Lives between Ramallah and Amsterdam) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice moves between performance and film, exploring how social choreographies and forms of collective organization manifest in art. Blending elements of documentary and staged performance, her work investigates the boundaries between reality and representation.

Haig Aivazian (1980, Beirut) is a visual artist based in Beirut. His work traverses moving image, sculpture/installation, drawing and performance, and explores how power integrates, affects and displaces people, objects, animals, landscape and architecture. Between 2020 and 2022, he was artistic director of the Beirut Art Center, where he founded and directed the digital publication thederivative.org.

Service
Performance – Nothing Will Remain Other than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World – Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian
36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice
September 6, 2025
Saturday, 3 pm
Auditorium
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion
Ibirapuera Park, gate 3
Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, s/n
São Paulo, SP
free admission