Meter & Light: Night

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

I believe artists and thinkers can only gain—aesthetically and philosophically—from engaging seriously with spiritual tradition, and such work ensures that the discourse of believers is not exclusively the purview of demagogues. – Zain Alam

During Session, the artist and his collaborators will be producing Meter & Light: Night, a 3-channel audiovisual installation which enacts in miniature and in music the interlocking rhythms of time in Muslim life, specifically after sunset. These rhythms are inherent to rituals such as prayers marking last light, sleepless recitations for the Night of Power, retreat to sacred shrines, the forgiveness of debts, and the breaking bread for all to share at dawn.

This is the second part of a series of installation works investigating the senses of time as lived in practice by Muslims. Drawing upon the artist’s formal training in Islamic studies, personal experience in the Sufi tradition, and as a composer, the installation depicts the cyclical measures used to mark the passage of light, seasons, and spiritual revelation. Time, in Muslim life, rests on the judgments of individual human perception rather than any supreme authority. Poets and philosophers in the tradition have written on how this cyclical, spiraling sense of time underpins—and provides a connecting thread to—the structure of Muslim art from Bengal to the Balkans.

Life and death are marked by a whisper into the ear of a newborn or recently departed. Ninety-nine rosary beads keep count in reciting the ninety-nine names for the Divine in dhikr meditation. Daily prayers are marked by the five (or three) positions of the sun in the sky. The Ramadan month of fasting, from dawn to dusk, is delineated from one sighting of the crescent moon to the next. Meter & Light aims to convene these measures into a single, interlocking experience—compressing a day’s five prayers into a single hour.

At the start of the Session, visitors will be able to experience the recently completed first installment of the project, Meter & Light: Day. The audio includes ambient instrumentals, breathy whispers, and gentle tapping. The visual imagery playing includes the artist himself rocking back and forth in nature, rosary beads being thrown into a small crater of sand on the beach, and fingers bumping against each other at a steady pace. Despite being filmed in locations as disparate as Staten Island and Morocco, the scenes feel like they belong together with their quietly disciplined marking of time’s steady passage. Additionally, the front of the Session space will be an open studio space with a mini-library for visitors to peruse the artist’s books, sketches, diagrams, and notebooks.

Through public programming and open rehearsals as the project progresses, the artist has invited not only thinkers focused on the project of re-enchantment in the modern world, but also local immigrant and BIPOC communities, often polarized in their orientation towards and experience of religion. Muslims, especially, occupy tenuous territory between xenophobia in the West and anti-creative religious orthodoxy within their communities. Fundamentally, the project asks “How can immersive new media technologies turn in another direction from the onward march of rationalistic, secular, bureaucratic forces against magic and myth today?” Sound especially carries spatial, resonant, and bodily forces in a way uniquely well-suited for the kind of collective assembly necessary for social justice.

Sam B. Jones is a director and cinematographer working across narrative, documentary, and hybrid forms. He’s directed music videos and short films for artists such as Josh Kline, Yung Jake, and Kalifa (f.k.a. Le1f), and photographed multiple narrative and documentary features, including his observational documentary Red, White & Wasted (Tribeca 2019). Sam’s work has screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Rooftop Films, Boston Center for the Arts, and numerous festivals including Tribeca, Big Sky, New Orleans, Maryland, and Cucalorus. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University with a BA in Film Studies.

Zeerak Ahmed / SLOWSPIN is a US-based Pakistani artist. She produces voice-based sculptures, site-specific installations and uniquely fragile sound collages that explore notions of identity, memory and longing. Slowspin has a distinct sound practice grounded in Hindustaani classical vocal traditions, dream-folk, ambient and experimental electronic music. Poetry and melodies in her mother tongue(s)—Urdu, Farsi, Purbi and English—build new textural soundscapes. She is presently archiving the sonic and intellectual histories of female folk music traditions from South Asia, drawing new forms from the poetic and melodic records of her ancestors. Exploring ways of listening, composing, and performing the sounding body, her work addresses critical immaterial art.

Warren Hildebrand is an artist and record label-operator who was born in Toronto and has been living in New York for the last decade. Since 2009, he has been releasing music under his solo moniker Foxes in Fiction and releasing music by himself and others on the acclaimed record label he founded called Orchid Tapes. He occasionally contributes editorial work to leftist magazine The Baffler and is the co-EIC of the film criticism website FilmSlop.