Sahra Motalebi

In Residence:
February 3, 2016 - February 21, 2016
Discipline:
Visual Art, Opera
Country:
United States

Sahra Motalebi is a visual artist, composer and vocalist. Her projects lay at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture and performance through which she explores the construction of narrative and its artifacts. Her work has been shown internationally at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum Ludwig, Abrons Art Center, Vancouver Art Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. In 2008, Motalebi’s multi-channel video installation and vocal performance Such is the Game of Authenticity was performed at MoMA PS1. Intangible Heritages, Belief’s Demise was presented at SculptureCenter in 2014 and she performed Sounds from Untitled Skies at The Kitchen in New York in 2015. Motalebi has also contributed to many collaborative projects including I Will Be Last with artist Kai Althoff in 2008 at Vancouver Art Gallery. The artist also performed with Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons) in 2008 at the premier of Hegarty’s release of Another World. Her collaboration with Mariah Robertson Life is God’s Musical: 4 Movements was performed at the Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012 for the Art in Embassies, US State Department’s 50 Year Anniversary. Motalebi produced Yves Klein’s Monotone Silence Symphony presented by Dominique Lévy and the Yves Klein archive in 2013. She scored Settlement House, a four-hour dance piece by Will Rawls, at the Abrons Art Center in 2015. The artist studied classical vocal performance, visual art, and art and architectural history at Sarah Lawrence College. She attended the Master of Architecture Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture focusing on the relationship between architecture, performance and visual art. Motalebi lives in New York.

 

Visual artist, composer and vocalist Sahra Motalebi will continue her work on Rendering What Remains, a 40 minute opera that includes multiple staged performances, video, sculpture installations and a novella. While at Watermill, Motalebi will further develop a section of the piece’s musical dialog called Flesh, Format. As part of the larger project, the piece explores the inner lives of two sisters living in dissimilar circumstances 100 years from now — orbiting themes of spiritual ritual, loss, interiority, as well as the indeterminate contours of relationally and intimacy in the digital age. Semi-autobiographical, the libretto is based on a year-long period of online communication between Motalebi and her sister living in Iran, to whom she bares a striking resemblance but has never met in person. Motalebi plays both herself and her sibling, utilizing experimental musical structure, narrative chorus, and visual dramaturgy to move between these two characters imaging each other.

Click here to view images from Sahra Motalebi’s open rehearsal (February 20, 2016).

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