Sahra Motalebi

In This Phenomenal Overlay, multiple scenes unfold simultaneously in an installation of set paintings and voice-sculptures. In one scene, analog instruments are reconfigured as future relics that upend categories of knowledge, complicating our assumptions about the voice and artistic production. In another scene, the artist's search for the etymologies of technological terms reveals historical forces and frameworks embedded in technology itself. The movement between the scenes of This Phenomenal Overlay traces the network of an archive through meaning-making and connection. With its own production at the fore, the exhibition continually reimagines and reworks its own processes in real-time.

As in Motalebi's previous performance-exhibitions and operas, This Phenomenal Overlay works across multiple registers of duration, material, and media. Evoking unexpected narrative forms and unlikely scenographic spaces in her projects, the artist offers the 'disjunctive' as a mode that creates multiple sites of possibility. Motalebi says, "I set up scenarios that allow for poetic experiments, within the work itself, but also within what an exhibition often entails, interrupting the logics of performativity and staging."

This multi-year project was developed during Motalebi's residency at the Chinati Foundation in 2020 and a fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute in 2021. Motalebi's current iterative text-based project Drawing on the Breath has been excerpted and published by Brief Histories Press (2020) and in Harvard Divinity School's journal Peripheries (2021). Special thanks to Caroline Coolidge, Fernando Delgado, Erwin Karl, at Louis Place, Wendy Webster.

Sahra Motalebi is an artist, vocalist, and writer. Her projects have been shown, and she has performed work at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, New Museum, SculptureCenter, Swiss Institute, and participated in the 79th Whitney Biennial in 2019. She has been an artist in residence at Chinati Foundation, Villa Empain, Watermill Center, and Yaddo. Motalebi has collaborated with Sophia Al Maria, Sibyl Kempson, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Will Rawls, Asad Raza. She lives and works in New York.

Brief Histories is a gallery that works with leading international contemporary artists to present art exhibitions and publishing projects. Founded in 2011, Brief Histories curates intersections for critical dialogue through exhibitions, special programs, actions, performances, and printed media.

The voice-sculptures in the exhibition run at 20 minute intervals.