Indigo Waves And Other Stories

During this session we float on the waters of two mixes by H1BA that carry us through a collage of music, rhythms, and practices from the Indian Ocean’s geographies. The first mix features music from South Asian, Arab, and Swahili coast cultures and examines musical genres such as Qawwali and Taraab. The second hour delves into music as ritual tied to Sufism, mysticism, saints, and talismans in relation to Islam. H1BA traverses poetry, chants, and rituals practices in the regions of South Asia, East Africa, and the Arab world with a featured interview with Nada Sayed. Nada takes us into her research around Zār ceremonies which span from Egypt all along East Africa, over to the Arabian Peninsula and spread further to Iran and Pakistan – grounded in the matrilineal, zār ceremonies center spirit-healing and resistance through orality, meditation, community, music, and prayer and have inspired the name of SAVVYZΛΛR.

H1BA is hiba ali’s experimental music project. hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they grew up in chicago and toronto and currently reside across eugene, or and austin, tx. born in karachi, pakistan, they belong to east african, south asian and arab diasporas. they are a practitioner and (re)learner of swahili, urdu, arabic and spanish languages. they work on two long term art and publication projects: the first being an art-based phd project that examines the architecture of surveillance and women of colors labor as it exists within the monopoly of amazon (corp.) and the second being a series of works that addresses music, cloth and ritual practices that connect east africa, south asia and the arabian peninsula in the swahili-indian ocean region.

they are an assistant professor at the college of design in the art & technology program at the university of oregon in eugene and they teach on decolonial, feminist, anti-racist frameworks in digital art pedagogies. currently, they are a phd candidate in cultural studies at queens university in kingston, ontario. their work has been presented in chicago, stockholm, vienna, berlin, toronto, new york, istanbul, são paulo, detroit, windsor, dubai, austin, vancouver, and portland. they have written for magazines such as: “c”, the seen, newcity chicago, art chicago, art dubai, the state, medium’s zora, rtv, and topical cream.

note: the use of lowercase denotes a turn away from egotism embedded in the english language (danah michele boyd) and towards ideas of the collective (bell hooks) and reminds us of the many realities, names and glyphs that cannot be said in such a colonial language.