A community event held on August 23, 2023, which invited migrant Middle Eastern artists to reflect on their unique connections to the ancient Babylonian past through original poetry and musical performances in Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, English, and German. The event was held under the Ishtar Gate in the Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, drew a crowd of over 1,500 people, and was covered in Tagesspiegel in the following article.
“GATE” is a project that seeks to rediscover the Ishtar Gate as a monument to movement that has a particular resonance for modern migrant communities: once a sacred threshold through which people from across the ancient empire passed to enter into Babylon, and now a expatriated and reinvented artifact, it is a perfect site for poetry about the pain and creativity of exile.
Event curated and organized by Aya Labanieh and Dr. Sophus Helle, featuring original poetry by Ghareeb Iskander, Widad Nabi, Liwaa Yazji, and Abdulkadir Musa, and a musical performance will be by Emrah Gökmen. Translations by Aya Labanieh, videography by Ghazal Aldakr, photography by Aram Al-Saed.
We are currently editing a multilingual poetry collection that includes the poems performed during the event, along with many other poems in Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Turkish, and Hebrew, along with their translations into English. We aim to bring together experiences and languages that are often separated by colonial legacies, by national borders, and by sectarian divides. The dialogue between the ancient past and the troubled present can thus provide a new framework for cross-cultural exchange, and a new vision of the rich, multi-ethnic, postcolonial, and polyphonic future(s) of the West and East alike.
Aya Labanieh 