RESIDENCY | LOS ANGELES | 2023–2024
Dena Al-Adeeb and Sholeh Asgary
Photo of Al-Adeeb courtesy of the artist, photo of Sholeh Asgary by Ebti
Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi-born artist-scholar-activist, cultural worker, educator, and mother. Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist, electroacoustic composer, performer, and educator. Their transnational lived experiences as refugees, immigrants, and women of color inform their collaborative, transdisciplinary research practice as artists dedicated to organizing with the peoples and struggles whose histories, societies, and cultures are under attack. Al-Adeeb and Asgary create socially-engaged projects, including performative, relational, and audience-participatory engagements, and interdisciplinary projects, including video, installation, sound, performance, and text.
“‘Crossings/عبور’ is an ongoing, transdisciplinary collaborative project between Dena Al-Adeeb and Sholeh Asgary that uses the Epic of Gilgamesh as a departure point in electro-acoustic expanded cinema performances comprised of sound, moving image, text, Iranian and Arabic vocal traditions, and sonic installations that excavate the relationship between racialized necropolitical destruction and bodies in protest across time and space. While in residence, ‘Crossings/عبور’ will be further technically developed, publicly presented, and documented. Operating a feminist refugee-centered transnational approach, the artists will host a community workshop informing aspects of the final presentation.”