Double Artist Talk: Ghazal Majidi and Zain Alam

Join us for an exciting double feature with visiting artists Ghazal Majidi and Zain Alam!

Starting at 2PM...

Ghazal Majidi's Practice to Date

In this artist talk, Ghazal Majidi will present her practice to date as well as her latest project Twenty Twenty-Five, an interactive digital installation that uses the viewer’s body as a lens through which images of aerial violence is revealed, abstracted, and re-encountered. The work draws from a growing archive of photographs documenting airstrikes across multiple geographies in 2025, translating these images through real-time computational processes into a proximity-based visual experience. Majidi will discuss the conceptual, ethical, and technical frameworks behind the project, including questions of spectatorship and the aesthetics of distant suffering.

The talk will also discuss a series of recent projects that engage archival footage as a living system, activated through bodily presence rather than passive viewing. By allowing the body to intervene in how images are revealed, fragmented, or withheld, these works further the relationship between personal or collective archives and embodied imagination.

 

and wrapping it up at 3PM...

Ritual Life as Musical Score: Sounding Islamic Time through Contemporary Aesthetics in “Meter & Light: Night.”

Artist Zain Alam discusses the creation of Meter & Light: Night (2025), a three-channel audiovisual installation that compresses the rhythms of azaan, prayer, and nocturnal devotion into twenty-two minutes. Drawing on his training in Islamic studies and his work as a composer, Alam explores how he translates ritual practice into contemporary form, embracing aniconistic constraints—no faces, only human voice and bodily percussion—while using macro lenses and digital signal processing to transform the familiar into expansive devotional scenes. Central to the work is how tone and rhythm convey what lies beyond semantic meaning. The talk addresses his research in Morocco and New York's Muslim communities, the work's development through artist residencies, and how religious life functions as its own kind of musical score.