Closing Event: Performance by Farah Elle curated by Fatoumata Gandega

Libyan-born Farah El Neihum – also known as Farah Elle, began composing music at the age of 10 as a means of making sense of the culture clash she witnessed as a growing individual & Artist in Ireland at the time. Teaching herself to play the piano and writing poetry to coincide with it in her teenage years, led her on to study Modern Music at BIMM Dublin University – graduating in 2016 and acquiring a degree in Songwriting, later

qualifying in various forms of trauma healing methods in order to explore music as a means of self-expression, personal development & healing.

So far, Farah Elle has released her debut album FATIMA, named after her mother – marking the culmination of a near decade of work, among many other collaborations and commissions. Weaving traditional Arabic melodies into the tapestry of her music, Farah’s compositions meld her combined North African and Irish heritage to create a sound that is thoroughly contemporary and completely her own. Following a sold out

run of her one-woman show LIBYA! at Dublin Fringe Festival 2025, Elle continues to write and explore the many facets of her Artistry. Songs about life and all of its’ trials and tribulations – her music captures the beauty of the ephemeral everyday and so her songwriting is ever- changing, keeping in flow with the nature of life and all of its’ seasons.

Fatoumata Gandega is a writer, filmmaker, curator, and artist based in Dublin. Her practice addresses themes of identity, displacement, and belonging, centring voices from diasporic, Muslim, and Black communities. She employs a collaborative and participatory approach with groups to co-create work that reflects their authentic experiences. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches,
Gandega integrates visual arts, film, cultural archives, and oral histories to challenge dominant narratives and reimagine the possibilities of representation. Her approach is rooted in storytelling, using narrative to explore questions of social justice, inequality and resilience.

Her work has appeared at the Dublin International Film Festival, Catalyst IFF, the Irish Film Institute, Rua Red, Sirius Art Centre, and abroad in Paris and
Brussels. Fatoumata Gandega is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Agility Award 2025.

She’s the current Superprojects Curatorial Fellow and participant of the Kunstverein Creative Producer Programme.

Born and raised in Iran, Maryam Tafakory is an artist-filmmaker working with textual and filmic collage, layering poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival fragments. Her practice traces quiet acts of erasure upon bodies, intimacies, and histories. She looks at what is often dismissed as trivial or excessive, moving through historical gaps, unspoken rules, and concealed queer stories. Her ongoing films and performances follow the workings of censorship, its internalisation, and the unseen architectures that hold it in place. Her research, in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema and with the women involved in Iran’s clandestine leftist groups of the 1970s, continues to unfold as a constellation of interconnected works.

Selected solo screenings/exhibitions include: MoMA (New York); BOZAR (Brussels); National Gallery of Art (Washington DC); Academy Museum, (Los Angeles); Museum of the Moving Image (New York); Barbican Centre (London); e-flux (New York); Filmoteca de Catalunya (Barcelona); LUX (London); among others. Selected group events include: Tate Modern (London); Cannes’ Directors Fortnight; New York Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Villa Medici (Rome); HKW Berlin; Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others. Her films have received numerous awards, several Oscar-qualifying, including the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival; Best Documentary Short at the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival; the Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFF Rotterdam, and the Cinema & Gioventù Best International Short Film award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. They have also screened at NYFF (New York), TIFF (Toronto), and BFI London Film Festival.

She was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, a MacDowell Fellow in 2023, and an ‘Institute for Ideas and Imagination’ Fellow in 2025.

Tafakory’s new film, Daria’s Night Flowers, functions as a fragmented, essayistic text, merging found‐footage and scripted narrative elements, typical of Tafakory’s experimental approach. It constitutes their ongoing body of research into representations of women, or the lack thereof, in post-revolution Iranian cinema. It focuses on the concealed queer stories and the representation of desire through a system of codes and leaving things unsaid.

Project Arts Centre is supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.