Palestinians Are Your Eyes
‘A worldwide reading to never forget’
Thu 15 Oct, 4.30–6pm
Ibraaz
93 Mortimer Street
London W1W 7SS
October 15, 2026, marks the three-year anniversary of the death of young Anqa Company performer Abraham Saidam under the bombs in Gaza. Commemorating the loss of a young man who wished to dedicate his life to art, his fellow artists entrust their experiences to writing in Anqa’s Palestinians Are Your Eyes, a work of distributed theatre which stages six stories by four young authors from Gaza in dozens of venues around the world as an act of global cultural resistance.
Artists for Palestine UK in collaboration with Ibraaz joins a global movement of 150 institutions across five continents to host a performance of Palestinians Are Your Eyes. Together, the space and actors stage not just a theatrical reading, but a piece of a collective memory. Each constitutive performance will be filmed and included in a documentary which chronicles the work as an extraordinary feat of mobilisation across borders. Drawing together moving readings of Ibrahim Alhelou’s Mother Poem and The Pawn; Dalal Elswerky’s Under an Olive-Green Sky and A Pillar in the Concrete; Fatma Yousef’s First Lesson;and Ala’a Sbaih’s Anqa Maghrib; these performances transform the irreparable loss of an artist into a vital call to action, giving voice to those silenced by war.
Any proceeds from donations collected during the initiatives will fund the operation of medical clinics, tent schools, community spaces, personal hygiene facilities, and recreational and theatrical activities dedicated to children at the Jafra Center in Jabalia, Gaza.
Readers: Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Issam Al Ghussain, Darius Hulme, Jasleen Kaur, Julia Sawalha, and Emily LaBarge.
Anqa is a theatre collective born from an initiative by Progetto REC. It is composed of authors and artists from Gaza and Italy who, through theatre and writing, transform their own experience into a direct, human, and unfiltered testimony. In Arabic, anqa means phoenix.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet and writer. Her debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf.
Issam Al Ghussain is a British-Palestinian actor and activist working across various mediums including theatre, film and television. He has appeared in plays such as Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Art from Politics at the Arcola Theatre and Wordplay at the Royal Court.
Darius Hulme is a linguistic consultant, educator of voice, accent and applied linguistics. He is grateful to carry the voices of Anqa into the rotten belly of this destructive empire. Not one of us is free until all children of history can live without fear of their destruction.
Jasleen Kaur is an artist living and working in London. She makes with the slurry of life, interested in the sociopolitical material that surrounds us. She was the winner of the 2024 Turner Prize and in 2025, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by The Glasgow School of Art.
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Artforum (until 2023), mousse, Bookforum, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to 4Columns and a contributing editor to frieze. Her first book, Dog Days, was published by Peninsula Press in 2025.
Julia Sawalha is a British actress whose passion for acting began through visits to film sets with her father, actor Nadim Sawalha. Winner of the RTS Best Actress award for Press Gang and Absolutely Fabulous, her versatile career spans over forty years across television, film and theatre.
From left to right: Darius Hulme, Jasleen Kaur, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Emily LaBarge, Julia Sawalha
