'EISH (LIFE)!

Join us for an Egyptian cuisine-inspired dinner and a durational performance by Andrew Riad of Ahlan Club with Anthony Girgis and Ren Martin In Egypt, bread is not simply something placed on the table, it anchors it. ‘Eish (عيش) — the Egyptian Arabic word for bread — carries within it the word for living, for being alive. It is sustenance and symbol, daily ritual and political matter; a humble flatbread that has fed generations and stood at the center of moments when hunger became protest, from the Bread Riots of 1977 to the continuing realities of bread and food in contemporary Egypt. ‘EISH (LIFE)! gathers around this foundational Egyptian staple, welcoming us to break bread, dip, share, and eat our way through an Egyptian cuisine-inspired dinner in which the flatbread is not accompaniment but centre: the first thing passed, torn, folded, dipped, and shared. It is also the instrument that begins the score of the performance, as we do when eating, beginning with bread. At the center of the shared meal, a durational performance meditates on ‘eish as both bread and life — on what it means to continue eating, gathering, remembering, and living in the presence of loss, life, love, and time. As we tear the bread and pass it between us, the performance considers the flatbread as a vessel for collective memory: carrying our histories, our kitchens, our families, and those who are no longer at the table, holding our loved ones across time through the rituals they leave in our hands. The performance unfolds through sound, repetition, breath, and the shared rhythms of eating, inviting us to attune to one another until the boundaries between performer and audience, witness and participant, begin to soften. Together, we sound, listen, chew, dip, tear, swallow. We gather around ʿeish not only as something that sustains us, but as a gesture of persistence — a celebration of life, considering its tenderness and our ephemerality. We take a mouthful of life, together (لقمة عيش); to mean: a mouth/full of Life. Venue: Project Space, WH51, Alserkal Avenue (pin) Time: 7PM - 8PM Date: Sunday, 01 November 2026 Anthony Girgis is a musician and lighting designer. As founder of AGAVE Productions, working between Amsterdam and Dubai, he shapes the atmosphere for architecture, theatre and live experiences. Musically, he explores improvisation and tarab through the lens of third culture and its diversity, moving between Western and Arabic traditions, jazz and electronic. Ren Martin is a self-taught drummer and guitarist whose work inhabits the space between composition and improvisation. Jarring, fragmented, frenetic passages collide with sustained, mournful exhalations of electric guitar. Heavy grooves give way to the fluidity of rhythm; restraint gives way to raw, relentless tension. His practice is a pursuit of contemplative states, and of the dissolution of composition and self. Andrew Riad (b. 2000, Cairo) is a Coptic Nubian Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and poet exploring the intersection of poetry, research, performance, and gesture. He works with archives, text, moving and still images, culinary happenings, and soundscapes to undo a monolithic history and propose a [re]imagined and silenced history revealing ostracized narratives as original sources of truth and fact. His projects imbue an emancipatory framework and understanding of language, of archive, and in that, gestures towards an opportunity for play and imagination to build towards what he calls a futurenarrative. For him, language is the experience of sound and ritual; of symbol and gesture and as such, is a site for resurrection, imagination, and [re]integration. Riad is a graduate of New York University Abu Dhabi (May, 2022) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and Creative Writing and Legal Studies and a MFA (Writing) graduate of Pratt Institute (May, 2025). He is an alumnus of the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF). His work has been shown and published regionally and internationally including Mizna Arab Art Journal, Makhzin Journal, Wasafiri Magazine, The Poetry Project (N.Y.C.), LaMaMa Theater, (N.Y.C.) The Museum of Moving Image (N.Y.C.), 421 Arts Campus (Abu Dhabi), Bayt Al Mamzar (Dubai), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), and elsewhere. His debut collection of poetry, Futurenarrative is forthcoming in the Fall of 2027 with Radix Co-Op Publishing and Printing.