staying with the trouble, call to prayer

Object, Audio Visual, Installation
2024 - 2025

The short-film ‘call to prayer’ is a meditation on on prayer, protest, grief and places we mourn through the resounding sounds and relationships that a call to actions at a protest and the call to prayer at the temple have. 
Field recordings from a puja on the the banks of the Ganga River and prayers at the Durga Temple in Varanasi, (a pilgrim site of mourning) are mixed into recordings of the Palestinian protests including the spoken words of a vigil for the late Dr Refaat Alareer and sounds from Pal-Pulse in London in Autumn 2023. 
Bells in the film illustrate recordings as reflections of Varanasi, Palestinan Protests in London and my first encounter with a Gunja Seed. 

A string of Gunja seeds which is both a holy prayer bead and can poison if ingested, sits amongst the work speaking to mortality and ephemerality of the life and the body. A gunja seed garland adorns Matangi in folk-tales - the goddess of spoken word, red and cremation - nodding to the sounds from the Varanasi River. Images of Durga Maa are placed in public and personal places around South Asia as a warding off to dark forces, illustrated with black and red eyes, mimicking the gunja seed. Both  are forces that hold the duality of death and a fight to be alive.

The physcial bell subverts itself as an object universally known for sounding prayer, its function becomes obsolete in hopes that the silence becomes the sound - speaking to the duality in expression of prayers and action in silence, not as the destination but as a temporary resting place where we can seek to hold space quietly.  
From the annual 72 second silence for the Grenfell Tower killing to call for remembrance and justice for those lives taken by systemic failures of the British Government and Arconic; who knowingly supplied flammable cladding to the building. To the silent protest in Jerusalem in 1929 - a demonstration organised by Palestinian women to protest the British High Commissioner’s bias against Arabs during the Buraq Uprising - Silence as quiet forms of dissent can signify unity, solidarity and sitting with what is.
However silence can be a way to deflect, to ignore - witnessing without sound can willinging deafen us to the horrors around us. When we don’t speak up, when words can’t describe the horror anymore, when the world becomes too loud. When we deeply listen, what can we hear in silence? How can we quieten enough to stay with the trouble?

The bell is adorned with Mukala and Jala mudras for doves and pushing water aside symbolising the encouragement of what’s inside to pour or fly out.

PLA, Gunja Seeds, Steel, Moving Image