Dani Abulhawa’s practice is focused around body movement in response to place and politics. Much of her work is informed and inspired by her history of practice as a skateboarder. Dani’s most recent project was a short film, The Slide, which premiered in Sheffield on the 70th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. The slide converges Dani’s familial and professional connection to Palestine by exploring her own movement across the tense geographic borders of Israel and Palestine in relation to water-based themes that underpin skateboarding as a cultural practice and the politics of access to water, which are a fundamental part of the conflict.
As a part of the development of the themes connected to The Slide, Dani will be working in studio 307 on a second chapter of creative enquiry. Working in remote collaboration with skateboarder and art historian, Ted Barrow, and by drawing on a range of sources, Dani will explore the politics and poets of ’The Wall’ through movement, sound, video and writing. Walls can be understood as architecture and symbols of division, barricade, enclosure, protection and prison from a political perspective, and as a surface on which to subvert authority when used by skateboarders.