Sight/Geist Series
Zain Alam: I am sounding a sacred space
Performance & Discussion
Thursday, November 30, 2023
6-8pm
The 8th Floor
17 W 17th Street, NYC
Image courtesy of the artist.
I am sounding a sacred space is a sound performance by Zain Alam featuring recitations of the azaan (Islamic call to prayer) distilled into pure tone, as extension of and departure from Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. With the participation of vocalists Nadine Murshid and Tanaïs, from varying traditions of melody (and ma'qam) across the Islamic world, the artist asks how sound can convey cultural knowledge despite the fixity of text and create sacred space in the process.
This program is part of the second season of Sight/Geist, a series at The 8th Floor that supports local emerging film and performance artists. Doors will open at 6pm with The House Edge partially on view. The performance will begin by 6:30pm, to be followed by an artist discussion and Q&A led by Charles de Agustin, initiator of Sight/Geist and Events & Communications Manager at the Foundation. All of our events are free and open to the public, with RSVPs encouraged. Navigate here for information about visiting and accessing our space. Email us with any questions.
Zain Alam is an artist and musician of Indian-Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn, NY. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” his recording project Humeysha began during his year working as an oral historian for the 1947 Partition Archive. His work is a project of translation using contemporary pop forms, found sound, and oral history as means of investigating one’s position in an outside tradition or community. Alam’s practice extends his sonic vision into video, performance, and writing. His works are braided together by a passion for the borrowed voice, re/de-contextualization, and bricolage — for how a personal mosaic of sound can empower minority and marginalized to engage in self-creation on their own terms. His essays have been published in Miami Rail, Buzzfeed, and The New Yorker, and Humeysha has been covered by the New York Times, Vice, and Village Voice. His performances have been staged at venues including Public Arts, Webster Hall, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Alam has most recently completed fellowships with Bruce High Quality Foundation, Marble House, and South Asian American Digital Archive. zainalam.com
With vocalists:
Nadine Shaanta Murshid is associate professor of social work at University at Buffalo. She has training in singing songs of Tagore which remains an occasionally nurtured interest that finds expression at cultural events and drawing rooms in the multiple homes that she occupies.
Tanaïs is the author of In Sensorium: Note for My People, winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, and the critically acclaimed novel Bright Lines, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They are the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Tin House, and Djerassi. An independent perfumer, their fragrance, beauty and design studio Tanaïs is based in New York City. They are currently working on their forthcoming novel, Stellar Smoke.
Image description: A sandstone minaret with a light brown vertical stripe pattern of the Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques in India, surrounded by a light blue sky and many birds flying around it.