WORKS
LENIS
Publication, 2023
Published in volume 26 of 2HB, a journal for creative and experimental writing in contemporary art. This includes drawings from the Lenition series, and is a development of work begun in the earlier video work Lenis.
Read the work as published in 2HB here.
YA MAYLA
Performance, 2023Performance at Gr’ambacht, Mechelen, Belgium, June 2023. Part of an ongoing project developed in residence at Q-O2, a workspace for experimental music and sound art in Brussels.
The project explores language loss, translation and song, particularly in the Arab diaspora; and pays attention to the materiality and corporeality of voices. This performance was built from recordings of conversations about one song in particular, Ya Mayla Al Ghoussoune by Fairuz. Song lyrics are (mis)-translated and these translations, with all their idiosyncrasies, hesitations, inaccuracies and certainties, have their own poetry.
LENITION
Lenition drawings. From an ongoing series, 2021-2023
Drawings from everyday notebooks that pay particular attention to the scrawled lines, the accidental or extraneous marks. The drawings are a development of my interest in signs of the the loosening of language and the traces of physical effort behind it, evident in handwriting as in the voice. The drawings become something like visual poems. At the same time, among the mundane notes there are snatches of phrases that had an aphoristic quality, which have been translated into poem-prints. And so the work is shaped by processes of transcription and translation, and the play of intimacy and distance that characterises those practices. I am interested in drawing—and especially copying—as a physical undertaking that performs that play of closeness and distance.
LENIS
Video, 5:09 minutes, 2021
Produced for Pommel, a broadcast for Nottingham Contemporary. First aired 16 July 2021.
Produced for an exhibition looking at artists working at the intersection of textual, visual, and sonic performance, this video brings together snatches of sound with images from found notebooks and domestic detritus. It marks an early exploration of themes that have shaped the subsequent work, Lenition.
Lenition is a linguistic term for a weakening of certain spoken sounds, from the Latin ‘lenis’, for soft. Ideas of weakness and softness have guided this work. Our induction into language is an induction into social discipline. When language breaks down—as when the body breaks down—the loss of that discipline is understood as weakness and incoherence (and sometimes insubordination). Developing this work has brought these terms into view, refracted in the biographical elements that come through in the source material I use.