All welcome, pre-registration required

Of Places and/in Time is a performance lecture by Ali Talaat and Alina El Assadi, bringing together digital and New Media elements like projections, experimental film and digital art to comment on the passage of time and its influence on the Land around us: How do these two primordial entities ebb and flow to create and destroy knowledge in and around our communities? How do we record and transmit culture and heritage outside of the grasp of these forces? Is it even possible to etch in stone if the stone itself erodes in Time?

Land and time interact in many ways. Land dictates the passage of time with it’s density; more space transversed hastens the passage of time for the transverser. And the movement of time alters the form of space, stretching and squeezing it around itself. The concept of deterritorialization awakens in the folds of Time affecting Land. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the weakening of ties between cultural knowledge and awareness between Land and its inhabitant Bodies is a result of the Bodies of Time and Land affecting the space around themselves. It is in fact these bodies that affect the change, reforming and reorganizing outside of human understanding and capabilities.

This programme is organised by Assembly 2025-2026 member Ahmed Bilal as part of the Youth Takeover 2026.

This programme happens in conjunction with Community Assembly: Performance Arts & Theatre-Making gathering, in collaboration with Off the Grid. This session introduces a performing arts community into the Youth Takeover, extending the exhibition’s reach into live practice through facilitated discussions and guided exercises.

Ali Talaat is an artist and researcher from Egypt, based between Lisbon and Cairo. His work examines how ideas, objects and spatial systems transform as they move across contexts, questioning fixed notions of ownership, value and authorship through processes of translation, copying and use. His projects often take the form of tools, prototypes, and spatial interventions that engage with public space and collective use. Moving beyond exhibition formats, his work proposes alternative infrastructures where artistic thinking intersects with everyday life, technical systems and long-term spatial transformation. At the center of his practice is If Copy Then Value, a long-term research project that approaches copying not as reproduction but as a generative act, a method through which ideas persist, deform and find new life across different authors, environments and uses. The research is grounded in questions specific to Arab cultural contexts, where the politics of access, ownership and artistic legitimacy remain structurally contested.

Alina El-Assadi is a Ukrainian-Palestinian artist based in Sharjah. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Sharjah and Masters in Fine Arts from Kingston University in London. Her practice develops from her backgrounds and training in photography and installation where she explores the intersection between fictive and non-fictive narratives based on the UAE’s history. Her current practice revolves around photography, sculpture, printmaking, installation and moving image with the exploration of her identity and the theme of belonging as the main topics.

Ahmed Bilal is a Pakistani installation artist and creative technologist. His work is driven by a fascination with perceiving the world in new, unconventional and often uncomfortable ways. He creates immersive experiences inspired by esoteric philosophies and experimental art movements, hoping to peer through the veil of the visible.