Installations
Ahmed creates site-specific sound installations. She is interested in creating visual-sensory experiences that interact with, intersect or interrupt existing architectural spaces.
Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave, 2024
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Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave, 2024 |
Three-channel sound installation | Documentation available upon request
Akron Art Museum. Aug - Dec 29 2024
In creating her sound and video installation titled Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّں میں تو پاہونی, Zeerak Ahmed (born 1990, Lahore, Pakistan; lives New York, New York) drew from the folk music traditions of her family’s native region of Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. The songs included in the installation are fleeting for many reasons. They come from a culture that was severely disrupted by the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947—a time of bloodshed and migration, during which Ahmed’s Muslim family relocated to the newly formed nation of Pakistan. They are in the dialect of Purbi, which is no longer spoken by the migrants who settled in Pakistan. They are part of an oral tradition and were never written down.
The particular songs in Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّں میں تو پاہونی were also sung by women in their private quarters, only among one another, and never in public, due to patriarchal prohibitions that prevented women from gathering together outside the home. Ahmed’s mother and grandmother appear in her videos—they passed this music to her, having learned it from their own female elders.
The installation includes a loop of six songs that trace a woman’s life from birth and celebration, through marrying and leaving home, to the acceptance of new circumstances that allow the cycle to begin again. The project’s title is a line from one of the songs, reflecting the bittersweet emotions of departure. As she sings these words, Ahmed feels deep resonances of belonging, ancestry, and memory. Her videos also include images of the landscape in Pakistan, reflecting her family’s migration and longing for home, which the artist feels all the more as an immigrant to the United States. Though Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّں میں تو پاہونی is quite personal, Ahmed also intends for it to be relatable to anyone who might search for their own sense of self by connecting with the past, which is distant yet ever-present.
For more info visit: Akron Art Museum
After Dec 2024 this work will be part of the Museum’s permanent collection. This exhibition is made possible by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Lehner Family Foundation, Mary and Dr. George L. Demetros Charitable Trust, John P. Murphy Foundation, and Kenneth L. Calhoun Charitable Trust. This project was supported [in part] by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Special thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Katzin and Ahmed’s grandmother, Zara Mumtaz and her mother Maliha Mumtaz, without whom none of this would have been possible, as well as Omeed Veiseh, Khusro Mumtaz, Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Shahzad Ismaily, Nida Ghouse, Rauf Saami, and Ustaad Naseeruddin Saami for their invaluable contributions and continued guidance for this archival project.
Apnay Mahal Ma, 2020
Three-channel sound installation
For the month–long residency at VM Art Gallery, I used the sense of sound to interrogate notions of longing in relation to migration.
Amidst the many physical consequences of the global pandemic that began in early 2020, I reflect on the expansive migration to virtual territories. From within these technologies and digital realms of global activity, I examine what our sensory bodies can and cannot access.
When the partition of 1947 occurred, the songs of my ancestors travelled with Ammi, my maternal grandmother. She comforted herself through the words and melodies that escaped with her when she moved across the border of India and Pakistan. Invisible, weightless, easy to carry and conceal, songs of her home, and her own, were passed down to Amma, my mother, and then her offspring, as a way of connecting us to our origins.
As a recent migrant to the U.S I think about what I brought with me and what I now take into uncharted places online. Working in the VM gallery from afar, I suspend as an audio-visual projection in an amorphous space, performing a folk song that transcends borders, connects me to my ancestors, and composes the place where we still live. Recalling my grandmother’s beloved song “Suno Sakhi”, I reconnect to a distant past through the ritual of singing and through the poignant lyrical expressions of devotion and longing for what now seems unattainable.
The distance, delay and decay of digital communication highlights the current fragility of our increasingly virtual lives, where sonic memories and oral histories attempt to reconstitute our living quarters, our Mahal.
Exhibited and made with the support of IRL: In Real Life & VM Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan.
Curated by Mallika Rangoonwala
Video by PakaStudios
Images by Humayun M
Special thanks to Omeed Veiseh, Danish Faruqi, Danish Khawaja, Abi Tariq and Joseph Randolph.
ALOUD-II, 2020
Video installation
The voice of the head, nose, throat, chest and base connect to allign with the c(h)ord.
Exhibited at the collateral exhibition of the Lahore Biennale 2020 in collaboration with the Art Plaza Lahore, Pakistan.
Curated by Foundation Art Divvy, Zahra Khan.
ALOUD-I, 2019
5 channel sound installation in 12 x 20ft steel container.
(Documentation available upon request)
Channeling notes from the base, chest, throat, nose and head, I draw out my selves.
Exhibited at the Quantum City: Territory | Space | Place, International Public Art Festival, KPT, Karachi, Pakistan
Curated by Amin Gulgee, Sara Pagganwala and Zarmeene Shah.
Memories of Skin, 2018
Sound Performance and mixed-media installation
For this installation I arranged sound, sculptures and a projected video to further sound the feeling of skin.
A cacophonous sound piece of clashing steel sculptures reverberates in the gallery space. These loud sounds were made from the sculptures that once held my voice. They now hang empty and disassembled. As a cleansing of their memory, an ablution is performed: showering onto the objects is a video projection of the flowing and rearranging blood vessels that lay under the skin. Skin, like memory, moves. The smooth and shiny surfaces of the sculptures now reflect waves of red streams that create a new landscape. On closer contact with headphones, you hear voices that recall closeness. Vocal calls responding to textures of skin are triggered live and layered on top of another to create a unique shared remembrance.