Personal Accounts - The Giving Tree
3-channel video & sound installation
2025
The Giving Tree’ is Adila Hassim’s favourite children’s story. She read it to her children again and again. The tree loves a child and gives all she has to enable their happiness: leaves, apples, branches, trunk, stump - everything.
What is the demand of a more liveable and loving world? What does it ask of us if not everything? Preeminent black African feminist writer Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola lives by a dictum: to never invoke the violence of rape culture and femicide without simultaneously, “gesturing towards its unmaking”. For Arya Lalloo, filmmaking and activism coalesce in a radical praxis of storytelling - of tending to lives lived and lost in the wake of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Human rights lawyer, Advocate Adila Hassim, works to realise the more liveable, loving world she imagines for her children, embodying this ethos in the slow juridical labour of defending lives rendered precarious, from abandoned mental health patients in South Africa to a civilian population under siege in Gaza.
Unmaking the world, imagining it differently. It is for these women, these mothers, the difficult, life-giving labour of giving and exceeding this everything.
installation views (forthcoming: Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv & MoMA PS1, NYC)
preview (request access)
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Survivor Offerings
In addition to what is presented (and withheld) in the installation itself, collaborators in Personal Accounts sometimes choose to share supplementary offerings which are made available online. These may be narrations of their experience or practices of survival and wellbeing, such as prayers, poems, playlists, recipes or artworks.