Throughout 2026, past Artists-in-Residence and Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows will activate ISSUE Online (io) — an evolving platform for digital-first works — in celebration of the 20th anniversary of ISSUE’s AIR program.
On Tuesday, March 24th at 12pm EDT, the season’s first digital release features a recorded conversation between BINT (2023 AIR) and Leyya Mona Tawil (2020 SFCF), captured at the 22 Boerum Pl. theater. The dialogue unfolds as an intimate exchange on rest, renewal, and the lineage of incubating ideas at ISSUE Project Room.
After being introduced to each other’s respective practices in 2023, the connection later extended to the Bay Area, where Tawil presented BINT’s work at The Lab. Reflecting on a period of intentional pause following her residency, BINT speaks to a period of personal and collective reckoning—considering the role of art amid ongoing global crises, the power of witnessing, and the ancestral and cultural resonances of the voice as instrument. The conversation also highlights Tawil’s new series, SPARKS, which convenes artists, authors, organizers, and makers whose practices are oriented toward liberation.
BINT is an interdisciplinary artist creating immersive work across sound, installation, and visual forms. A SWANA femme in diaspora, she translates the esoteric tools and crafts of her heritage into multisensory experiences. Site and audience activation are central to her practice. Drawing from cultural art forms she grew up around—where traditional crafts often serve communal and utilitarian functions beyond ornamentation—she extends these models into the present through multimedia technology. Her objects, installations, and experiential performances transform environments into participatory ritual sites. As a musician and sound artist, her work centers long-form drones, processed harmonium, sampling, cassette tape, and live sound manipulation. In recent years, her work has focused on site-specific commissions and immersive audiovisual experiences rooted in sound and experimental composition. BINT was a 2023 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. She has exhibited and performed internationally, with commissions and collaborations including Black Sabbath, Joan La Barbara, Yale Center for Collaborative Arts & Media, and the Arab American National Museum.
Leyya Mona Tawil, also known as Lime Rickey International, is an artist, curator, and cultural activist. Tawil is Palestinian and Syrian; engaged in the world as such. Tawil works in dance, sound, and hybrid performance practices. She has been commissioned and presented extensively throughout the states, Europe, and the Arab world. Tawil has stewarded TAC Temescal Art Center in Oakland since 1997, and is the founding director of Arab.AMP - a platform for worldbuilding artists from the Arab/SWANA diaspora and our allied communities. She was the 2020 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at ISSUE Project Room for her series NOMADIC SIGNALS, which stretched into 2023, and is now a member of their Artistic Advisory Council.
