New European Ensemble and Geert Mul: Oriental Time

New European Ensemble: contemporary small ensemble with The Royal Conservatory of The Hague students and visual artist Geert Mul. In line with the idea of heritage safeguarding, our second part of the program at RMO will focus on Intangible Heritage. The special program presented by the ensemble will focus on Syrian composers of today. The piece by Shafi Badderdine will be presented to the international public for the first time.

The Oriental Time is a newly made art work by award-winning video artist Geert Mul. The collaboration between the ensemble and Geert Mul seeks to cross the boundaries between artistic media, such as live performance, video and installation art.

Program:

Shafi Badreddin – Sigha
Zaid Jabri – Glyptos 2
Nouri Iskandar – Oriental miniature
Kareem Roustom – Buhur

Visual performance:
The visual arts performance is structured around a photograph of Palmyra, Syria taken in March 2017. Three perspectives of time and their contextual affects are the subjects of the project Oriental Time. These will be presented on screen accompanied by music:

Nature-time: The clouds, the sky, night and day. They represent the timescale of nature that is super-human. From that perspective, human suffering, construction and destruction are just non descriptive.

Archeological-time: The old site of Palmyra: The age of this site defies many of our daily cultural perspectives of time. From this perspective construction and destruction, war and peace, love and hate are as present as night and day. Things come and things go. That is the natural human condition.

Actual-time: Traces of recent ISIL destruction. This brings on an actual time perspective, a perspective of actuality, morality, culture, art, politics, ethics, death, destruction, loss, suffering and survival in all its horror, pain and beauty.