“MES MER RISING ”
“...the work itself is so weighty in emotion, one is left holding ones breath.”
SELECTED WORKS
Decolonial Listening;
messiha’s Sound body, a deep listening praxis (2022)
Length: 50min
The work is performed with the company of live musicians (guitar, bass, percussion, electronics).
What if you are continuously erased in the present, do you still continue to exist in the future?
Coming from a region that no longer exists and continuously undergoing erasure, messiha places herself in and beyond the histories she belongs to in order to find a future self free of institutional demands. From her perspective a place here becomes an ephemeral trans- geographic sonic territory continuously re- articulated within the work and which can not be owned.
Decolonial Listening is an act of interrogation, sonic experimentation and personal as well as communal healing. It is the act of listening as an excavation of radical sounds and reverberations creating a place along her collaborators and audience made of complexity, layering and diversity in which “other” stories merge in a collective fabric.
By combining sound studies, quantum physics, and neuroscience with movement practice to think through the intimate link between sound and space, Decolonial Listening constructs new ways to question culture, sound and movement across public space and time.
Excerpt from a performance at Center Cultural La Bobila in Barcelona, Spain, June 2022
“messiha is a strange creature that defines new spaces of non verbal theater. ”
SEVDAH body (2019)
Length: 50 min
The work is performed with the company of live musicians (guitar, violin, bass) or with a live DJ.
SEVDAH body is a psychedelic, punk, world & messiha’s homage full of wonder, low -end frequencies, patience and free spirit, transmitted via Balkan folk melodies, noise and fictional folk dances,to a homeland, yet to exist, created with a collective of Balkan musicians (Zoran Pars Vujanović electric guitar, Merima Muminhodžić, violin, Hrvoje Čalučović, bass guitar), brooklyn’s only dj Kuji, and live projected visuals and volumetric graphics by Brooklyn based neoneon (Andrey Radovski, visual direction and 3D graphics,Ray Weitzenberg, video projections).
SEVDAH body deepens the connection between the moving body, sound and social structures, laying out emergent framework for questions related to corporeality, ethnicity / race and citizenship. The culmination of messiha´s multi-year research into ethnography, both regional and diasporic reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a global context.
promotional video from a performance at Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina Sarajevo, September, 2019
Sevdah body installed at ICI - CCN, Montpellier Occitanie, France
“messiha speaks to the fight to be able to be, and become the truest version of ourselves, pressing against societal norms, institutionalized constructed behaviors, assigned roles based on gender. Her work is emotional, thought - provoking, gritty, raw and also joyful and playful. ”
bosnianborn; SHE IS A REFUGEE STAR (2015)
Length: 50 min. Bilingual
The work is performed with the company of a live DJ.
bosnianborn; SHE IS A REFUGEE STAR is a multi-disciplinary/dimensional approach to how a community can transform oppressive structures in performance and politics into a liberated connection of diverse minds and bodies.
It seeks ways to move beyond tropes and representation in which we usually receive refugee lives. I am thinking: Yes! I am Muslim. I am an immigrant. I am a refugee. However, those are all fragments of my full humanity. How do I engage audiences in a more humanized image of what it could mean to move in Europe as Muslim, refugee and immigrant?
promotional video from a performance at La Mama Experimental Theater
New York, June 2017
“messiha shares her rigorous research on how identities are formed through complex articulation of power and meaning .”
I am (2012)
50min
The work is performed with the company of a live DJ.
I am is a meditation on freedom, made in support and honor of all the freedom-loving people around the world, and those who have lost their lives fighting for it.
With its raw and honest physicality I am takes us on a personal journey where anything seems possible. With it s captivating strength and emotional complexity played out to gritty, percussive yet ambiguous sounds created by Paul Matthis in collaboration with messiha I am brings us face to face with the surreal and raw nature of our existence where we can only but once again be astonished with the Inconceivability of our reality. The only thing left to do is to reach inwards in the ever so ephemeral yet incessant encounters with the absurdity of our world.