Project 7: Shahzia Sikander, Vijay Iyer, Bhanu Kapil, Fred Moten

Shahzia Sikander coined the concept of The Glass Mosque. A loaded phrase, the material and the spatial configuration, and the meaning of “mosque,” is the very subject that the collaborators are extrapolating and interpolating and working to rethink its meaning across time.

Bhanu Kapil unfurls themes and tangents usually sublimated in writings on the experiences of migration. She accomplishes this through psychoanalytic readings as frameworks that allow the melancholic story of India’s Partition to hold a central position in this exploration of the mosque as a metaphor.

Fred Moten refuses the traps of set language and preconceived categories and channels deep knowledge of literature and music into this formulation.

Composer and performer Vijay Iyer draws the tendrils of migration into space through sound in ways that penetrate and rupture, that in fact shatter deep within the viewer any preconceived expectation tied to the spatial concept held by the often-politicized term mosque.