Dina Mimi

Dina Mimi's performance Grinding The Wind will have its world premiere at the Alkantara Festival in November. Before moving to the theatre, Dina Mimi will have a technical residency at Espaço Alkantara to finalise the performance.

This lecture-performance navigates the missing parts of the story of my great-grandfather, a Palestinian man who underwent medical testing and open heart surgery at an Israeli military hospital in 1969. This event triggers a journey through collected archives, oral history, dreams, and books.

Like a surgeon who dreams of inserting a finger into a heart during surgery, my research around the performative aspects of open heart surgery is motivated by desire. My great-grandfather’s heart, sealed behind more than one hundred stitches from his chest to his waist, was reduced to ashes in his final gesture of self-immolation. His body collapsed into an inaccessible archive. Knowing that control of the body is at the centre of colonial power, I try to understand his descent into silence and protest, even in death.

Dina Mimi, August 2020

Creation, video, and performance Dina Mimi Sound creation Bashar Suleiman, Maya Khaldi

Grinding The Wind is commissioned as part of The Consortium Commissions—a project initiated by Mophradat.

Dina Mimi is a visual artist born in 1994 in Jerusalem, currently living and working in Amsterdam, where she is artist-in-residence at De Ateliers (2020-2022). Her practice is multifaceted and uses video, sound, performance, and text. Dina researches the body and death in the public sphere, as well as notions of visibility and invisibility in the relation of archaeology to objects and of museums to death. She also researches protest as performance. Her work examines the role of the body-force in public space in Palestine. Dina obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 2016 and her MFA degree in art in the public sphere from ECAV (École cantonal d'art du Valais) in Switzerland in 2018.