HOLDING: SHOLEH ASGARY

December 1, 2022 – january 15, 2023

culminating event:
a gathering of performance, tea, and dialogue presented by sholeh asgary
friday, january 13, 6–9PM
with featured collaborators: roco cordova, tonya foster, adrian montufar, sibs ndwayana, marjan vahdat, and ven voisey

SHOLEH ASGARY is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose works implicate the viewer-participant in future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary's early somatic experiences in constant movement across borders influence her. From this positionality lies an inherent tension throughout her work: between visibility and opacity, history and myth, worldmaking and death--with none in opposition to the other. This complexity drives the core of her work.

As part of HOLDING, the ongoing artist-in-residence series at Berkeley Art Center, SHOLEH ASGARY seeks to build collaborative processes, transforming the space of BAC into a MAJLES, a program that situates the body as a site of knowledge, enacting movement and voice from and within the physical place they occupy to explore complex relationships to space, place, and one another. “Majles” is an Arabic and Persian term that translates to “council,” and in this context, it refers to a creative contract as a form of decentralized government. Presented as a series of open labs to which the public is welcome to observe, programmatically, MAJLES follows a loose structure and includes transdisciplinary collaborations with other programs, collectives, and beings.

Sunday Sessions x MAJLES

Sundays, from December 4th through January 15th, Sholeh will invite guests into the residency space at BAC to collaborate and produce scores which the artist will build upon. During these Sunday Sessions, the gallery will be open and the public is welcome to quiet observation of the artists at work.

The residency will conclude in a final performance and artist talk on Friday, January 13th. More details will be announced as the series unfolds.

Sunday, Dec. 4, 2 - 5pm

Sunday, Dec. 11, 2-5pm

Sunday, Dec. 18, 2-5pm

Sunday, Jan. 8, 2-5pm

Sunday, Jan. 15, 2-5pm