These three remain, Bait Gholoum Ibrahim, Sharjah, 2023, Installation views, Photos courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation
THese three remain
2023
these three remain
a sister and two brothers
in the wake of suicide, orange blossoms, lilac brocade tiles
school books and alcoholism
a bruising line of patrilineal violence
he loved music. that was his gift to us
these three remain, faith, hope and love
conditions of possibility in the tangled afterlives
of enslavement, displacement, indenture, extraction
the humiliation of blackness, and brownness
love in the grammar of violence
violence in the grammars of love
love remains
in the wound, in survival
in spite of
in the cracks and crevices and dust-motes
in dancing, laughing, crying, being still
in the music
- - -
12-channel sound installation
Love sounds, and resounds, as listeners enter the light bathed space of These three remain. In the sonic embrace of its twelve speakers, an evolving, body-saturating soundscape animates and entwines over seven thousand samples of the word “love”, drawn from lifeplaylists compiled by the artist and her brothers, Gaston and Jon-Paul. Washed in pastel hues and sequenced in 12-channel surround sound, the installation offers a tenuous, euphoric spacetime otherwise - an entanglement of loves, sounding as the resonant, dissonant, disorderly remains of possibility.