Which Yesterday is Tomorrow? (2020)
Which Yesterday Is Tomorrow? is a solo exhibition co-created by Andrew Demirjian and Dahlia Elsayed. This multi-sensory installation reimagines the Silk Road caravanserai as a potential site for the exchange of ideas and culture, it is a rest stop for the future based on the past. By drawing upon the vocabulary of social and sacred architecture from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), Elsayed and Demirjian – both di- asporic artists from this region – create a space for engagement, pause, and reflection. Which Yesterday is Tomorrow? questions Western per- ceptions of time with an immersive environment intended to break down barriers between, past, present and future by reconnecting visitors with the senses, rituals, and mythologies that have been diminished in an age dominated by relentless commerce and time scarcity.
“Timely and timeless, 'Which Yesterday is Tomorrow?'prompted rethinking of a whole range of issues, from colonialsim and diaspora to trade and refugees.” Sarah Tanguy, Sculpture Magazine
Which Yesterday is Tomorrow? questions Western perceptions of time with an immersive environment intended to break down barriers between, past, present and future by reconnecting visitors with the senses, rituals, and mythologies that have been diminished in an age dominated by relentless commerce and time scarcity. This piece began with a substantial amount of research into the sonic, poetic and material culture of Ottoman era coffee shops and Silk Road caravan- serais. The installation conjures a fictive location where aesthetics and ideologies are exchanged freely, establishing an alternative to the historical narrative of colonization, crisis, and territoriality typically associated with the region’s portrayal in American media.
“The same modularity marked Demirjian’s immersive sonic and textual landscape. His spellbinding audios, which improvised on old wind and string instruments,
enveloped the gallery through four portable speakers.” Sarah Tanguy, Sculpture Magazine
The soundtrack is also intended to evoke an alternative to the linear experience of the temporal in favor of cyclical or slower conceptions of time. All of the sounds start with pure tones from Anatolian folk instruments like the saz, ney, kemençe and were slowed down to extreme lengths using a customized granular synthesis program. This approach creates a sonic environment that feels as if you are resonating along with a saz string or moving at an impossibly slow speed of a ney vibrato. These sounds were then moved around the space, articulating different architectural features of the environment creating a feeling of entering into an alternative experience of time.
The installation also questions the design forms for sonic delivery, instead of brown rectangular book-case speakers, each of the four speakers in the installation are a sculptural, ritual object fab- ricated by the artists that could be moved by the visitor.
The ‘Poetry for Alpha Wave States’ section of the installation is an interactive sound piece that trig- gers poetry whispered into the listeners ears as they lie down on the rugs or lay prostrate. The art- ists, in collaboration with artist Sha Sha Feng, created a painted striped circular disc that triggers poetry when movement occurs near it. In line with the idea of creating a place for aesthetic dialog, Elsayed and Demirjian reached out to artists and writers from the SWANA region to contribute a poem by a South West Asia/North Africa poet that relates to themes in the exhibition. This sec- tion of the installation creates a novel corporeal aesthetic experience for the body, immersing the listener in the lush fabric of the rug, lowering the body to the floor to engage with poetic language.