Our Look Was as If Two Lovers, or Deadly Enemies

overview

Our Look Was as If Two Lovers, or Deadly Enemies (2015) is a three-channel video installation that juxtaposes two reading performances with more traditional documentary footage of the urban landscapes of the San Francisco Bay Area. In the first video, Rasheeda, a recent graduate of Zaytuna College, reads an English translation of ‘And He is with you wherever you are’, a meditation on Qur’anic verse written by Amir ‘Abd al-Kader (d. 1883), the nineteenth-century Islamic and Sufi scholar who led Algerians in the struggle against French colonialism. A second video records her reading ‘Living Like Weasels’, an essay from American writer Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982). Rasheeda selected both texts and the filming location in the natural landscape of the Berkeley Hills at sunset, suggesting her relationship to knowledge and the sacred. Three synchronised soundtracks further accentuate overlapping spatial relationships between voices, language and place.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12