\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of Nour Mobarak\u2019s \u201cDafne Phono,\u201d 2024, Museum of Modern Art, New York.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n \tFor example, in the online exhibition “Locus\/Lacuna” (2022), Mobarak uses the ancient memory technique of “memory palaces” to trace the location of personal memories. She presents her memories of being exorcised by an evangelical pastor through three different audio tracks, which visitors can mix live as they walk through an enlarged painting of the memory site, a plush red seat. Try to recall this experience gap<\/em> or lost memory, but in the process of trying to remember, temporality and subjectivity become confused and new thoughts, ideas and images are formed in the mind of the viewer.<\/p>\n \n \tMobarak later poured the painting of the red seat into mycelium so that only traces remained. The image is metabolized by the fungus in a process of self-destruction and, like memory itself, is given a new existence through its decay.<\/p>\n \n \t\u201cOffset is very comfortable for me,\u201d Mobarak said of transforming sculpture into sound work and sound work into painting. “I’m ambivalent about it, but other people think it might have something to do with being a diaspora, because you never really belong where you are. You’re always a little bit out of place, but you always fit in.”<\/p>\n \n \tMobarak’s family is from Lebanon; although she was born in Egypt and raised in Italy and the United States. As a teenager, she received seven years of classical vocal training before abandoning operatic formalism in favor of the experimental music and poetry scene she discovered while at the University of Sussex in England. Later in Paris. Mobarak’s frequent exposure to languages \u200b\u200bshe was not fluent in made her realize early on that sounds and feelings communicate differently than semantics.<\/p>\n \n \t“Dafne Phono” begins with an investigation into the origins of the speaking voice as an instrument. Rinuccini and Perry’s daphne<\/em> Performed using a new style called recitative, in which the singer imitates the rhythm of spoken words rather than focusing on the melody. This transformation of a single voice into music, and the body into a material instrument, is related to Mobarak’s long-standing interest in mechanized sounds and expanded vocal techniques that have long been used by Joan La Barbara ), Meredith Monk (Meredith Monk) or Klaus Nomi (Klaus Nomi) and other avant-garde singers. Explore the limits of the human voice.<\/p>\n \n \t\u201cBut I realized that a lot of the artists I knew were Anglo-Saxon, and the distinctly radical sounds they made were also present in many other spoken languages,\u201d Mobarak said.<\/p>\n \n \tGiven the limited sonic palette of the Romance languages, Mobarak sought to create an opera that encompassed the widest range of human voices through translation daphne<\/em> Translate into some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages.<\/p>\n \n![\"Installation](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/D2A4935_PRESS-2000x1334-1.jpeg?w=400\")
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\tA famous story from Ovid’s first century narrative poem Metamorphosis <\/em>The story goes like this: After the sun god Apollo killed the snake dragon Python, Cupid, the god of love, shot two arrows at Apollo in revenge. The first caused Apollo to fall madly in love with the fairy Daphne, while the second caused Daphne to insult Apollo, forcing her to turn into a laurel tree to escape his advances. This ancient Roman story of unrequited love and conquest was the basis for the world’s first opera daphne <\/em>The play was written and composed by Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri in 1598, and only the original script remains.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated articles<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \n \tLos Angeles artist Nour Mobarak reimagines sound and sculpture daphne<\/em>On view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through January 12, it expands on the classic myth of Daphne and Apollo to tell a different story around the power of language and personal transformation. The exhibition “Dafne Phono” features 15 singing sculptures made from mycelium (the root-like structure of fungi).<\/p>\n \n \tOvid’s divine figures are reduced to basic geometric shapes like ovals and cones, which together tell the story in some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages, such as Abkhazian from Abkhazia, From the Outback Chatino from Oaxaca and Silbo Gomero from the Canary Islands of La Gomera. The result is a strange and deeply sensory aural clash of whistles, clicks, and consonants, each shaped and deformed by the fungal tissue within which it is encased.<\/p>\n \n \tIn his early works, Mobarak began to think about the relationship between language and mycelium, Father Fugue <\/em>(2019), a full-length album and series of columnar sound sculptures, is the culmination of 15 years of recording with her polyglot father, Jean Mobarak. Side A of the album features tender, recursive dialogue and wordplay between Nour and Jean, who speaks French, Arabic, Italian and English but whose degenerative cognitive condition prevents him from sustaining a memory for more than 30 seconds. When listening to the record, however, the content becomes less important than the materiality of their voices, as if the space for communication lies in the musicality and rhythm of the ongoing conversation rather than the conversation itself.<\/p>\n \n \tFor Mobarak, who was cultivating mycelium at the time, transferring these recordings to speakers covered with rotting mushrooms was an obvious next step: \u201cWhen I looked at these mycelial clumps, I felt like I was also looking at a Synaesthetic, objectified stuff “in the form of conversations I heard in the studio,” she said in an interview. art news<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n \tWith its root-like structure, mycelium proliferates through a constant cycle of decomposition and regeneration, which Mobarak links to the life cycle of human language. “I’m really excited about the potential that mycelium allows me to talk about cause and effect and external systems,” she said.<\/p>\n \n \tThe presence of uncontrollable external forces \u2013 namely time, deterioration and fragmentation \u2013 is a thread that Mobarak continues to explore, and his work flows seamlessly between performance, sculpture, moving image, poetry and music.<\/p>\n\n
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