Hiba Ali

This show features burning incense. For visitors with scent sensitivities, this exhibition will be sensory friendly between 10-11AM Monday-Friday and 12-1PM Saturday.

There was this cosmic dust that fell at our feet; we watched it surround us, our bodies and minds, until we began to glow ourselves. What can we sing to ourselves to get through challenging times? Hiba Ali’s exhibition, Lullabies for the stars in our eyes, is a portal into Ali’s bodily world-building on the coastlines of the Swahili-Indian Ocean.

In this large-scale sculptural installation, metallic pools invite the audience in an act of co-creation to rake surrounding sand as they gaze at video works and listen to the installation’s sonic reverberations. Paired with this is a VR meditative installation, Lullabies for tears, which invites visitors to be guided by Ali’s avatar, the star, on a somatic body-processing journey.

Ali examines affect (the ability to impact change) and its world-building capacity for emergence and potential in their matrilineal languages of Arabic, Arwi and Tamil. Thinking through the power of the breath found in the letter of “h”, written as ھ ح ہہ ஹ in Arabic and Arwi, Ali explores the back of the throat where secrets, anger and sadness dwell. Through historical research, they narrate their experience of love, loss and queer joy found in the body and its spirit.

The exhibition is an immersion into interpretation that, like our bodies, changes, slips, and ultimately, refuses to sit still as any one single thing.