Alla Abdunabi
The exhibition borrows its Arabic title, ‘Suni‘a Bisihrika’, from a phrase created to facilitate the memorization of the eight main Eastern (Arabic) musical maqâms. Each letter in this phrase represents the first letter of a main maqâm’s name. They are formal musical structures that have been used for centuries across a vast geography extending from the Arab world to neighboring regions and Central Asia.
Beyond their function as aesthetic musical structures, maqâms carry layered historical, cultural, social and political meanings shaped over centuries. Looking closely at their names, genealogies and circulation reveals that they reflect a rich artistic and cultural diversity beyond national, religious, and linguistic identity. They point instead to long histories of exchange, coexistence, translation, movement and rupture. They have endured through political shifts, cycles of exclusion and persecution, wars and the collapse of empires.
The exhibition draws inspiration from the signs and connotations conveyed by the histories of the maqâms beyond their sonic forms, approaching them as vessels of memory, identity and transformation.
Across sculpture, painting, installation, photography and video, the exhibition reflects on questions of ethnicity and identity, art and authority, and relations to land and other beings. It also considers how artworks may hold the trace of what is at risk of disappearance.