BINT
Mamluk Shadows
2024Presented at Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) in collaboration with friend, historian, researcher, and educator Beshouy Botros. Mamluk Shadows takes the Mamluk Sultanate — warrior-slave rulers who governed Egypt, the Hijaz, and greater Palestine from the 13th to 16th centuries — as both historical site and living through-line, moving between two of their defining aesthetic technologies: ornamental brass lamps and shadow puppetry. Both are arts of projection, shaping what is seen and what remains hidden.
Drawing on the Mamluks' deliberate engineering of public space for acoustic effect, the piece reconstructs this spatial logic live with multiple speakers angled throughout a darkened room, subwoofers carrying low rumblings through the floor, sound as architecture and instrument of power.
Audiences surrender the visual and inhabit the sonic, as light and shadow move through the space, activated by poetry spoken in ritual movement. Woven from historic archives, film, and social media footage from Egypt and Palestine — some captured as recent as that same morning — the compositions dissolve the distance between past and present, pulling centuries into one darkened room.
Drawing on the Mamluks' deliberate engineering of public space for acoustic effect, the piece reconstructs this spatial logic live with multiple speakers angled throughout a darkened room, subwoofers carrying low rumblings through the floor, sound as architecture and instrument of power.
Audiences surrender the visual and inhabit the sonic, as light and shadow move through the space, activated by poetry spoken in ritual movement. Woven from historic archives, film, and social media footage from Egypt and Palestine — some captured as recent as that same morning — the compositions dissolve the distance between past and present, pulling centuries into one darkened room.
Mamluk Shadows, 2024
Sound and ritual performance (light, sound, video projections, Q&A lecture session)
Running time: 30 minutes, 55 seconds
Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), New Haven, CT, USA
In collaboration with Beshouy Botros
April 12, 2024
Sound and ritual performance (light, sound, video projections, Q&A lecture session)
Running time: 30 minutes, 55 seconds
Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), New Haven, CT, USA
In collaboration with Beshouy Botros
April 12, 2024
