Strange Land: A Thousand Solitudes

Strange Land: A Thousand Solitudes is an audiovisual performance by visual artist Randa Mirza that explores the intersections of memory, colonial history, and archival practices in the Arab world. Reimagined for the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 to explore modernity’s paradoxes – individuality within the collective and the echoes of history in contemporary life – and in collaboration with musician Aya Metwalli, Mirza alters photographic documents from the Arab Image Foundation into a live, sensorial, and improvisational experience. Through sound and image, the performance investigates the history of photographic practices and the materiality of images, taking the audience into an ephemeral, reimagined past where archives become living and evolving narratives.

Randa Mirza (b. 1978, Beirut; based in Marseille) is a visual artist. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, live audiovisual performance, and installation. Situated at the intersection of documentary-making, artistic writing, and personal narrative, her work creates spaces for reflection, reparation, and resistance in contexts shaped by violence, erasure, and political rupture. Through a distinctly feminist and decolonial lens, Mirza interrogates hegemonic systems of knowledge, power, and representation in order to allow suppressed histories and imaginaries to emerge.

Aya Metwalli (b. 1988, Cairo; based in Bern) is a singer, composer, and performer whose practice explores the voice as a site of intersection between raw expression and electronic transformation. Emerging from the sensory intensity of Cairo’s urban soundscape, her work draws on Arabic maqam, experimental electronics, and noise to create performances where the voice is pushed to its limits.