Gharīb is an ongoing series of works connected to sonic dissent and alternate political systems. This research formed the solo show called Gharīb as the Armenia Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (curated by Anne Davidian, in collaboration with Elena Sorokina). The Pavilion explored forms of world ordering, both musical and political, which remain outside the Western imaginaries. Here, the gharīb is read as a dissonance to the prevailing understandings of time, rhythm, and attunement.
“At last we arrive to gharīb ֊ that notion of dissonance, resistance, and retreat. Gharīb translates as a ‘stranger who enters into our midst’. As a word of almost-cryptogenic origins it moves at ease across Arabic, Armenian, Farsi, and Turkish languages, proposing a way of simultaneous being within and without ֊ beyond a language, a place, an origin and a common myth ֊ a contradiction at its heart, its crucial principle of definition.
Gharīb has long been associated with the clandestine activities of music-making, illegal social clubs, early psychotropic substance trade and the underground. Gharīb as a mode of disillusionment and liminality, as a way of retracing the political margins. To embed and disappear, to exist and evaporate at the same time, an attempt to belong, a way of sensing of the world.
The cosmology of the Gharīb Pavilion plays through the modes of sonic dissent, vernacular knowledges, and messy systems of elusiveness. Songs of illicit origin, alternate tuning systems, oil extraction and Cher with her autotune tricks, Gurdjieff’s harmonious law of seven and divine systems of digestion. A certain musical score emerges, dotted by the hushed voices of the unheard, the disappeared, and the radical.”