September 13 – September 25, 2023 | Art Center, The Cube

First-year MFA student Dima Abou Zannad’s ʿāḥdūdil-baḥr (at the border of the sea) explores the aural elements of a multispecies world in which humans makes poems and songs whose rhythmic structures echo those of the seas. Song is a structured response to the nonhuman world, and it is also “a body whose joints are meter, rhythm and melody” according to Adonis, in the Jahiliya era, the so-called Age of Ignorance before Islam.

She explains the concept for the work: “Arabic poems conform to a certain metrical rhythm, which remains constant throughout its entirety. Each hemistich conforms to the meter, so that each line consists of the same metrical pattern repeated twice. In Arabic, the meter itself is named baḥr. The word baḥr translates to sea. There are 16 meters, 16 buḥūr, 16 seas.” Featuring Marcel Khalife’s 1980 album At the Border (عالحدود) on audiocassette, ʿāḥdūdil-baḥr maps the sonic rhythms of the Levantine coastline. “The songs, ever attributed to the Lebanese shore by those who have witnessed its turbulence, are a combination of Arabic poetry (some vocalized in a Beiruti dialect) and musical compositions, all throughout, in rhythm with their sea,” she continues.

The work was developed in conversation with ongoing research by the Elements Pod (Katia Arfara, Karno Dasgupta, Sheetal Majithia, Dale Hudson) into ways that arts practice can help humans imagine a shared planet outside the narrow confines of anthropocentrism under the auspices of the Art & Humanities Research Kitchen on the Anthropocene.