At 2:30 pm today we present ‘Above the Palms’ by Haider Al-Shybani:

As mundane notions of time are perpetuated in our postmodern world; perhaps it is through memories that we can shift our understanding of how experiences are sounded, silenced and transmitted. This piece is part of a larger project currently underway and based on findings from oral histories, archived audio/video and the artist’s personal interpretations of the ideas; a project in development with the CCA creative lab.

As a 2nd generation Iraqi-Scot who has never lived in Iraq, the artist’s investigations look at the way individual and collective memories of the Tigris-Euphrates region shape how the homeland is recollected, imagined, and performed by the diaspora. Using sound, Haider Al-Shybani explores the disruption, in time and place, and the socio-political pressures that shape accessibility to the experiences of older generations. Furthermore, this work hopes to incite an engagement with these processes by the various communities and wider society. ‘ Perhaps engaging ‘memory muscle’ in a practice that views time as less divided, can open space for alternative reproductions of the past and an understanding of where gaps can be found in the collective archive of memory. It is within the transmission of this chaotic and nonobjective cerebral atlas that we may glimpse previously unimagined futures’.

Haider Al-Shybani is an artist working with sound. As part of an ongoing investigation into the ways in which we experience sound, image and text; the artist continues to re-think the relationship between these elements. His work draws on the techniques of early dub pioneer Osbourne Ruddock, the creations of Halim El-Dabh and the Iraqi maqam as sung by Farida. Greatly influenced by the writing of John Dos Passos’s, Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher; the artist searches for other ways of putting things together or, leaving them apart.