Soros Art Fellowship
I am honoured to be one of the cohort of 11 people from around the world who are the 2019 Soros Art Fellows. The Open Society Foundations fellowship supports innovative mid-career artists whose work advances social change around the world. It provides artists with the resources to develop a large-scale project on their own terms in their own local contexts. This year’s fellowship focuses on artists and cultural producers working on art, migration, and public space. The generous funding allows us to take time to re-imagine our practice, and be inspired by each other. Our first meeting took place in New Orleans, a city I always wanted to visit. The meeting was filled with soulful food, emotional conversations, critical engagement, and a sense of fond camaraderie. I urge you to look up the work of every single person of the cohort and discover their important work.
As part of my fellowship, I will be developing a new work. The River That Fell for Us is a site-specific sound installation that uses long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) set by the river/border between Lebanon’s norther border with Syria. LRAD is a device first created by the US army to send urgent communications and warning messages. They are now commonly referred to as “sonic weapons” and have been used by police for crowd control and attacking protestors. The sound installation will build speakers that are directional and on high frequency similar to LRADs, to send stories to the Syrian side of the border. These stories will be based on oral histories collected locally, and rewritten as stories. They will be mixed with soundscape and originally composed music.
