From the urban soundscapes of Cairo to sonic encounters with artefacts such as Nefertiti and Sakhmet at the Neues Museum in Berlin, sound artist Yara Mekawei probes the mysteries of existence by oscillating between antiquity and futurity. Melding the realms of Sufi poetry and ancient Egyptian funerary papyri such as The Book of the Dead, Mekawei creates layered compositions that translate hieroglyphs to Arabic to numbers to sonic signals via formulaic and affective registers. Tracing her work with digital technologies to encoding and decoding practices of families and tribes in Yemen from the 3rd century BC, we unravel how sound offers ways of mediating the cryptic, forbidden and unknown.

With Guest: A prolific artist and scholar, Mekawei‘s sonic bricolages draw inspiration from the dynamic flow of urban centers and the key infrastructure of cities. Interested in the philosophy of architecture, social history, and philosophical literature, Mekawei implements the optical transaction from the musical conversation and transfers sound waves to visual forms. Her work is based on sound as an essential tool of vision. Her philosophy of composition is shaped by sophisticated practices that convey messages of the conceptual dimension to the public. Mekawei is a research-based practice humbly proposed in history, intimately connecting the ideology of the mythic past to the developed technology of the eternal present. She is working on a sonic composition based on the literature of the Sufi philosophy and the methodology of the Book of the Dead.

Always room for dessert:

• www.yaramekawei.com

• www.blackland.berlin

• radiosubmarine.wixsite.com/radiosubmarine

• www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/james-simon-galerie/exhibitions/detail/elephantine

• www.hkw.de/en/programme/ballet-of-the-masses/pitch-poetics-football-commentary-as-oralture

خضرة محمد خضر — متي اشوفك ياقلبي مبسوط ( بحب بلدى لايف ) بدريه السيد — موال طلعت فوق السطوح شفيقة — جربت الحب مره