A calling from the Moon
Multi media Installation, dimension variable, 2023
Produced during Masaha residency, Misk art institute, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
The central premise is inspired by a folklore circulating in rural Pakistan that suggested that Neil Armstrong heard the Islamic call to prayer on the moon during the first moon landing in 1969. I was drawn to this mythological inflection of one of modernity's most quintessential narratives of technological and ideological supremacy.
The multimedia installation takes the form of a sterile laboratory, in which the artist-as-scientist investigates the relationship between two landscapes: the moon and the desert. What did Neil Armstrong hear when he first stepped foot on the moon? Did he step on the moon, or did he step foot on a desert in Saudi Arabia? Did the lunar landscape look extremely familiar to him? By creating a setting of para fiction, the two landscapes are confused. The piece becomes an act of material displacement and cyclical translation between fact and fabrication.
The project appropriates the authority of scientific image-making and turns it toward subversive ends. Using technical drawings that employ the language of science and archaeology, the drawings and photograph study the topology of the two landscapes in relation to one another, and as one another. A series of photographs, taken in a desert outside Riyadh, documents found debris measured against an archaeological scale, closely echoing images of the objects left behind on the lunar surface by various space missions.
The sculptures are abstractions of lab equipment. Through the presentation of found material, photographic investigation and exploration of the interconnectivity between seemingly disparate landscapes, the project blurs the lines between reality and fiction.