2024

collaboration with Arzu Ozkal

SRS (Silk Road Songbook) is an audio-video installation that weaves songs of resistance into the land, broadcasting women’s distinct, unruly voices on an ancient Eurasian migration route between Istanbul, Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi’an. By conveying the complex stories emerging from each place and person we work with, we challenge Orientalist exoticism, cultural tourism, and censorship, disrupting the grand, tidy narrative of the popular perception of “Silk Road.” The 5 songs were generated with collaborators in communities along the route; they chose the landscapes, musical genres, and lyrical content. For each place, their voices are the dynamic driving force; the land is the visual anchor.

Across the projections in the SRS installation, a visual thread is woven through all sites forming the horizon line of the land, connecting different places as co-existing within a commonality and continuity of space. The aural thread across all places is sourced from natural elements found in each environment, a shared sound of the land that forms an atmospheric 6^th voice, a voice that carries the wind, water, rustling grass, birds and thunder.

SRS is funded by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, American Turkish Society, University at Buffalo, San Diego State University, and United University Professions.