Urok Shirhan – XENOPHONES (Eng)

xeno-
from Ancient Greek ξένος ( xénos, “foreign, of a stranger”)

-phone
φωνή ( phōnḗ, “sound”)

In this talk, Urok Shirhan presents works and ideas as part of her longterm research project XENOPHONES, which can be translated both as ‘strange sounds’ as well as ‘sounds of a stranger.’ The project takes as its main premise the displacement of image and sound, body and voice to disrupt the “familiar” or “habitual,” and engages with materials through sound, voice, and body directly as affective forms of knowing inseparable from thought and discourse.

Urok Shirhan (Iraq/The Netherlands) is an artist whose work explores the politics of image, sound and speech in relation to (national) identity. Working mainly with video, performance and writing, her projects are often entangled with found materials and narratives informed by her biography and family history of political migrations. As an Iraqi-born, once asylum-seeker turned “new” Dutch citizen, issues surrounding displacement, identity and belonging are of particular interest.

Shirhan holds an MA (Hons.) in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University in London and is currently a Research Fellow at BAK basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht.