Join us in the Townhouse First Floor on Sunday, January 19 at 7 pm for SOCIAL SECURITY's CLOSING EVENT.

SOCIAL SECURITY was a short-term open-studio residency, event series, alternative fundraising platform, mini-exhibition space, and sometimes a café/restaurant, hosting artists/designers/filmmaker Yazaan El-Zo’bi and Islam Shabana, Moshtarak and Obada. The project has been in operation since December 1.

On Sunday January 19, the artists will bid farewell to their studios and the curators will host a final WAGBA, our micro-funding/hospitality initiative that raises production funds for the resident artists. We will be serving a delicious Peruvian fusion meal.

Over the past 6 weeks Yazaan El-Zo'bi and Islam Shabana have been developing “The Nymphaem: Cultural Heritage Observatory,” a mixed-reality, hallucinatory simulation of a possible future Sakakini Palace, turning the neglected and decaying (though once thriving) space into a memorial piece for the future. Past iterations of the “Nymphaem” have included holographic 3-D projections in a tropical garden setting and a live performance by music artist Bosaina, who last week was introduced as an object in the sculpture garden. On Sunday, artists Yazaan and Islam are bidding farewell to heritage, holding a digital auction of their own personal works and unveiling the last manifestation of the “Nympahem.”

Designers Deana Shaaban and Ahmad Aiyad of MOSHTARAK are well on their way to take the new collective/co-working design space outside of its initial incubation zone in SOCIAL SECURITY. Throughout the residency, they held salon-style discussions in an indoor forest setting to brainstorm how to launch MOSHTARAK as a hub for production and discussion around issues of conceptual visual language and the design of everyday life.

Filmmaker Obada used his studio to work on his first feature film, "I seek refuge from god from the word I." He turned his studio into a real-time archive of images, events, thoughts and statements that are informing the world of his film, which he presented and discussed to different filmmakers, critics and curators throughout the residency.