The launch party for Al Andalus in New York, a zine produced by Molly Crabapple and students at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center, will feature a performance by rapper Omar Offendum, speeches by Molly Crabapple, filmmaker Assia Boundaoui (The Feeling of Being Watched), professor Hisham Aidi (Rebel Music), and readings by workshop participants. This will be followed by a panel discussion focusing on Al Andalus’ enduring legacy in contemporary New York. Free copies of the zine will be distributed to attendees and art created by Molly Crabapple and workshop participants will be displayed.
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Al-Andalus in New York
Thursday, May 9, 2019 @ 6:00 pm
Featuring:
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Historical Society.
Omar Offendum is a Syrian-American rapper / poet living in Los Angeles. Known for his unique blend of Hip-Hop & Arabic poetry, he’s been featured on prominent world news outlets, lectured at a number of prestigious academic institutions, collaborated with major museums & cultural organizations, and helped raise millions of dollars for various humanitarian relief groups. A graduate of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, he’s been able to carve a distinct path for himself as a thoughtful entertainer / activist able to speak to a multitude of relevant issues & diverse global audiences over the course of his decade-long career. Offendum was recently named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow for 2018-2019.
Hisham Aidi teaches international relations at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008) a comparative study of market reform and labor movements in Latin America; and co-editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave 2009). Aidi is the recipient of the Carnegie Scholar Award (2008), the Open Society Foundation Fellowship (2010), and his book Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture won the American Book Award of 2015.
Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American filmmaker and journalist. She has reported for PRI, BBC, AlJazeera, VICE and CNN among others. Her debut short film about hijabi hair salons for HBO Documentary Films premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning directorial debut, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia’s Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” is currently a New America National Fellow and a fellow with the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she is iterating the AI fueled sequel to her film: the Inverse Surveillance Project. She has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking, Chicago-native, currently based in southern California.