Zain Alam is a Queens-born artist and composer of Hindustani origin whose work explores religious ritual as a site of the ineffable. Working across sound, video, performance, and installation, his practice considers where language and translation falter in conveying meaning, and how close attention to the familiar can reveal the strange.
Focusing on the physiological nuances, gestures, and rhythms of the human body, Zain’s work examines the sonic and visual dimensions of spiritual practice. His approach draws connections across traditions, using film and sound as a new, non-linguistic means of translating forms of shared experience. His proposal HOLY HANDS builds on a body of work looking at hands in Islamic rituals, expanding that inquiry into Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions to begin mapping a somatic understanding of syncretic meaning.
“Choreography of the hands is one of the universal traits of religion and spiritual practice. Hands are little bodies of their own, fingers branching out with joints of their own from a core, all covered with lines in shapes often read in palmistry to understand one’s future. They keep musical time. They trace the letters of ancient texts and tap out the tempo for sacred recitations committed to memory.” - Zain Alam
CYCLE TWO FINALISTS:
CARRIE SIJIA WANG, Untitled
“Having moved from one country to another, I’ve had to rely on boilerplate expressions to pass as legible. That experience makes me sensitive to the unnamed spaces of my inner world that are flattened and misinterpreted by templated language and social codes. My work both exposes these misinterpretations and uses them to create something unexpected.” - Carrie Sijia Wang
YATTA, The Black Wander Orchestra “I want to score a future where Black people wander through nature with an ease not readily afforded to us. I want to write music that encourages curiosity, wandering, play, and comfort in the natural world. For me, wandering and rooting are connected. Feeling rooted makes wandering possible...Black people have a complicated relationship to rooting. Black creativity has often been treated like a natural resource, extracted and circulated without returning value to the communities that created it.” - YATTA
SAM SMITH, Lost & Found NYC “Life is constant change, and change brings inevitable grief. These strangers are no doubt sharing loss, but invisibly. When communities were smaller, loss was a more shared experience. If your mother dies in a village of 100 people, odds are, everyone was affected by her in some way. In a city of eight million, grief can be solitary. This project celebrates New Yorkers’ characteristic individuality, while also holding the truth of our collective similarity.”- Sam Smith
“Standing is the legal word for rootedness: proof you belong somewhere enough to be heard about what happens to it. The eel fails it everywhere. Its birthplace lies beyond national jurisdiction, overseen by a commission constituted with no management authority under an explicitly non-binding declaration. Then federal waters, an interstate compact, a state agency, a city, a town that owns a culvert. One animal, a dozen authorities, no continuous party answerable for the whole life. The obstructions are literal: the eels cannot pass.” - Christopher Woebken