Joe Namy: Heavy with Love

Joe Namy: Heavy with Love

Artist and composer Joe Namy’s work considers how culture, memory, and power structures are intertwined with the history of sound, music and other aesthetic forms that vibrate against a turbulent geopolitical landscape. 

Namy’s exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) begins with the prompt Peace begins with _________, written in both English and Arabic. It’s a cue and an invitation for our patrons to begin their library journey with a simple reflection on peace. 

Through video, photographs, sound, and more, Namy’s multimedia installation Studies for a Library (2023) reimagines how peace can be taught to counteract systems of ideological violence. Namy’s intimate portrait of the Khalid Jabara Memorial Library commemorates the death of his cousin Khalid, whose life was abruptly taken on the front steps of his Tulsa, Oklahoma home in a hate crime by a racist neighbor in 2016. Organized by Khalid’s family and the B'nai Emunah Preschool, which his niece attended at the time, The Khalid Jabara ‘Tikkun Olam’ Memorial Library was assembled by a community of abolitionists and librarians dedicated to teaching peace and compassion to young children. 

Adjacent to the installation in BPL’s Grand Lobby is Libretto-o-o (A Curtain Design in the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love) (2017). This sweeping, brightly patterned curtain was made from a patchwork of fabrics sourced from Sharjah’s vibrant Souk and sewn together by local tailors. It is part of a series in which Namy examines historical and material cultural expressions of pan-Arab opera and theater. As an extension of this research, Namy has assembled documentation from Halim El-Dabh, the Egyptian American composer and electronic music pioneer, featured in vitrines on the second floor. Also shown on the second floor is Family Trees (2014–22), a series of photographs depicting olive trees, some as old as 2,000 years, taken in Namy’s family village of Deir Mimas near the border in South Lebanon.

For our youngest library-goers to our eldest, Heavy with Love is Namy’s beckoning towards the positive forces of love and social justice. 

Joe Namy: Heavy with Love is curated by Cora Fisher, BPL Curator, and Fawz Kabra, Curator and Director of Brief Histories, New York.

Programs

Exhibition Opening, June 17, 6pm, Grand Lobby, Central Library. Register HERE

With live music performance by Zafer Tawil on qanoun.

Storytime with Artists Christopher Myers and Joe Namy, June 18, 3:30pm, Grand Lobby Central Library. Register HERE.

About the Artist

Joe Namy is an artist, composer, and educator often working collaboratively through sound, video, performance, and sculpture. Their projects often focus on the politics of music and organized sound, such as the pageantry and power of opera, the noise laws and gender dynamics of bass, the colors and tones of militarization, the migration patterns of instruments and songs, and the complexities of translation in all this - from language to language, from score to sound, from drum to dance. Namy holds a monthly DJ residency Rhythm x Rhythm on Radio Alhara. They are a Sundance/Time Studios/Kendeda Fund fellow, and artist in residence for the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham. Namy is a PHD researcher at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and amplified at Ashkal Alwan Beirut, Art Night London, the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, Darat Al Fanun in Amman, the Berlinale, Boras Biennial, Detroit Science Center, La Biennale de Montréal, Nottingham Contemporary, Sharjah Biennial 13.