Friday, March 10th at 8pm ET, interdisciplinary artist and musician BINT presents their first program as an ISSUE Artist-In-Residence at MITU580 in Gowanus, Brooklyn. BINT has been collecting anonymous experiences of shame from folks of the MENASA (Middle Eastern/North African/South Asian) diaspora. These communally-individual experiences will be the focus of her 2023 residency she is naming "عيب:Solve et Coagula.”
Over the course of the year, she will be presenting three commissioned programs mirroring the primary stages of (Arabic) alchemical transmutation. All three programs will be audiovisual immersive sound rituals loosely based on the structure and setting of Sufi sem’a gatherings, in which these collective experiences of shame are transmuted through sound and ritual processing, as experienced through the audience. Sem'a is a traditional Sufi gathering in which a third communal space is created (often underground hidden from orthodox authorities) for active deep listening and collective participatory expressions of devotional music, chanting, and rhythm.
'Stage I: تسويد (The Blackening)’ is the initial burning of the gathered dross. The black of burning, the first whiff of char. The cloak of pain and shame of being othered, of exile and alienation. The rot of festering emotions finally uncorked. Though, the alchemical texts also remind us black is the fertile soil; key to the next stage of new growth and rebirth.
BINT will navigate the gathering through the process of dissolution via frequency, traversing–often viscerally–the spaces between dissonance and harmony, noise and rhythm, tradition and transgression. She will be deconstructing a traditional composition and instruments (vocals, harmonium, bandir, field recordings) through live sampling, synthesizers, and pedals.
Visit BINT on social media to submit an anonymous MENASA experience of shame you would like to release.
BINT is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Brooklyn. Working across visual, performance and sound art, BINT applies contemporary methods to the traditional multicultural technologies of her ancestries (Pakistani, Egyptian, American, etc). With a focus on inherited metaphysical tech, her work is interested in the perennial role of the artist-mystic in cultural preservation and liberation work. As a musician, BINT turns to a palette of dissonance, distortion, long-form drones and noise to access corresponding emotional states in herself and listeners–most known for her unusual approach to processed harmonium and multilingual vocals, through tape, analog synthesis and pedals.
In 2019, BINT released Katabasis: Act I, an EP applying dark ambient power electronics and Arabic mother tongue to her classical Hindustani vocal training. She has shown work internationally including performance art commissions for Black Sabbath, the Copro Gallery, Atelier de Mélusine and visual work at Coachella Music and Arts Festival. BINT is founder of The Barzakh, a podcast and educational platform focused on the revival and reclamation of Islam’s rich heritage of the occult and metaphysics.
