Program Notes

mesha; namesha (flower piece i)
dir. Fatemeh Kazemi + Zelikha Zohra Shoja
4:44
A group of self-exiled sirens named ayesha perform daily rituals of picking flowers; a eulogy for the petals plucked towards the uncertain future where their lyrics of “mesha / namesha (it will / it won’t)” become a lullaby as they drift further from the sea.

demarcations; you have black eyes
dir. Zelikha Zohra Shoja
9:13
Drawing its title from a song by Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir, “you have black eyes” is a stream-of-consciousness montage depicting collective bodies in a constant state of disruption, movement, processing, and grieving. It celebrates the body as a historical, domestic site of resistance through dance and movement including found footage of ants carrying flowers, rubab player Ustad Beltoon interrupted, and Hazaragi throat games across an imaginary landscape

WHAT THE BIRDS DID NOT TELL UPON THEIR RETURN
dir. Fatemeh Kazemi
12:49
From the artist:
I no longer know where this work begins. Perhaps it begins with a road toward Sharjah~Isfahan~Tehran~Syracuse, or perhaps much earlier, with stories that had already settled into the body before I learned to recognize them. It began with walking, although walking soon ceased to be movement from one place to another. It became a way of reading landscapes, following migrations, listening to bird calls, and entering conversations that seemed to arrive before language. What I had imagined as travel gradually resembled something closer to زیارت (ziyarat, pilgrimage), not because there was a shrine waiting at the end, but because the movement itself altered the conditions of perception. Every return carried a different body back.

St. Agatha’s Garden
dir. Zelikha Zohra Shoja
2:22
A grave watcher’s meditations on caring for the living and the dead.

In Search of Bluer Tongues
dir. Zelikha Zohra Shoja
16:00
In 2021, artist Zelikha Zohra Shoja planned to shoot a new film at the site of her maternal home in Kabul, Afghanistan, but due to the US withdrawal and return of the Taliban and ensuing violence, the project could not be realized. In Search of Bluer Tongues reimagines the domestic scenes Shoja hoped to play out in Kabul, working instead with members of resettled communities in the city of Syracuse and in Queens, NY. The resulting piece is an act of collaborative memory-making and a meditation on the diasporic experience of longing to be in a place that can only be watched from afar.

Leila and the Ring of Solomon
dir. Fatemeh Kazemi
6:20
An interview with a corpse washer.

Accessibility

Light Work is wheelchair accessible. Films will be captioned. CART services for this event can be provided for the Q&A portion of the event upon request.

To make accommodation requests or ask questions about facilities, please contact uvp@lightwork.org or 315-443-1369.