SHOLEH ASGARY
Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian born interdisciplinary sound artist who creates objects, installations, performances and audience participatory scores with interest in liminal spaces experienced by the viewer-participant. Her sound performances make use of her voice and innate properties of everyday objects as an ether for direct communication in an otherwise disparate circumstance of image. Asgary received her MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University. She currently resides in Oakland, CA where she is a Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice.
A 2021 affiliate artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), with current and upcoming residencies at Mass MoCA, Temescal Arts Center (Oakland, CA), and ARoS Art Museum (Aarhus, DK), her previous residencies include Wassaic Project (NY), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), Krowswork (Oakland, CA) and Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY). Asgary’s work has been exhibited and screened at such venues as Sotheby’s Institute of Art (NY), ARoS Art Museum, Platform 3 Gallery (Tehran, Iran), Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), Minnesota Street Projects and Gray Area Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), and Euphrat Museum of Art (Cupertino, CA). Her solo and collaborative sound performances have been presented internationally, with recent performances including Kulturmødet Mors Festival (DK), Center for Cultural Studies at University of California Santa Cruz, Soundwave Biennial (San Francisco, CA), Meetings Festival (DK), Stanford University, and Pro Arts Gallery (Oakland, CA). Asgary is a 2020/21 California Arts Council grantee with Arab.AMP, a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Project Grant recipient commissioned through Dance Elixir, and recipient of a 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant (Andy Warhol Foundation) for curatorial initiatives as Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery (San Francisco, CA), where she founded The Project Room.
“Breath”
Voice and breath thread through each other, sending signals that encode and activate bodily spaces. A love letter to myself where breath becomes an exoskeleton, I recorded this track using my voice, breath, and electroacoustic feedback. The piece is meant to be listened to in the same way it was made–intimately.
Embodied Prompt:
These instructions are meant to guide you into an embodied space with “Breath.”
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Access the recording above using headphones.
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With your arms down at your side, begin to move them in a horizontal direction away and towards your torso, or an abduction of your arms.
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Continue doing so through the track until they no longer feel to move.
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Feel free to substitute your fingers or other sensations if you are not able to move your arms.