Conference of the Birds
Conference of the Birds is a series of photographic works that fuse images of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests to propose new networks of cultural coexistence. By weaving images of these two distinct movements to one another, and digitally recombining them into entwined patterns, I have created a connection between the people in these movements.
In Islamic art, ornamentation is an art of transformation, with an aim to move beyond mere decoration in order to transcend and transfigure. This comes out of the Islamic preoccupation with the transitory nature of being. Daring to imagine that we can transform our world into something more beautiful, and that our current struggles are but a transitory state in our evolution towards a more egalitarian society. Through the creation of patterns intertwining my subjects, Conference of the Birds uses this idealistic outlook, and envisions a better world.
This project is named after the Persian book of poetry, The Conference of the Birds, written by Farid ud-Din Attar in the twelfth century of the Common Era. In this poem the birds of the world gather together to determine who will be their king, as they are without one. The wisest of these birds suggests that they should find the legendary Simorgh, a mythical Persian bird roughly equivalent to the Phoenix in Western mythology. When they finally reach the dwelling place of the Simorgh, all they find is a lake in which they see their own reflections. The story relies on the clever word play between the words Simorgh - a mysterious bird in Iranian mythology- and "si morgh" - meaning "thirty birds" in Persian. Over the past decade digital communications has enabled a brand new form of activism. But this new generation of activists has also made changes to the process of decision-making. Through actions such as the human microphone and consensus at their General Assemblies, the Occupy Wall Street movement uses an open, participatory, and horizontally organized process to make decisions. Like the birds in Attar�s poem, this leaderless movement looks within and values each member as an equal voice in organizing for political change.
The patterned works in Conference of the Birds are reminiscent of wallpaper or textiles that are domestic in nature, standing in for the network of relationships within a family or a community. The images of the Occupy movement from cities such as Toronto, New York, and Amsterdam are connected with those in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria. The endless patterns reflect the infinite and the enduring spirit of activism.
The works become a symbol for the global relationships whether virtual or face-to-face. The complexities of these patterns reflect digital culture and stand in for the networks of communication that connect us in this contemporary world. Weather through email or the various social networking sites online we communicate. We connect through our mobile devices and desktop computers whether we are in Cairo or in Toronto, linked through multiple nodes of interexchange, sharing and learning from one another.
In Conference of the Birds the patterned imagery is reshaped into a circular outline, in contrast to the traditional rectangular frame of a photograph. This reframing triggers a larger awareness of our mediated relationship to the photographic image and the camera lens. The circular forms bring attention to our own constrained inescapable view. At the same time, the repetitive structure of the images is a reaction to mass media�s tendency to overuse a limited scope of information. Just as wallpaper is used to cover and decorate a room, media saturation is utilized by governments to entertain while obfuscating. Repetition and reproducibility empowers images with the ability to construct and define history. With this work I aim to use the semiotics of pattern to reflect upon the possibilities of transformation of our lives by our own means.