Whitney Biennial 2019

Sahra Motalebi: Directory of Portrayals is an open-form opera made up of a series of performances, scenographic sculpture, video, musical scores, and texts. All of which I started in 2016. The work draws its structure from an ongoing online exchange between me and my sister who lives in Iran, and whom I had never met until 2018.

Complicated by its online formatting, this relationship with my sibling I feel in many ways exemplifies current conditions of self, of intimacy, and also of knowledge within our expanding cultural fields. Beyond borders like national lines of course, but still often at the limits of subjective projection and interchange. This is what I adapted as the opera, and it was really the driving impetus behind the project. The online aspect also informed the dramaturgical and narrative experiments within the work which held sprawling network of our interpretations. Voice, texts, images, love songs, quotidian updates, links accessed through proxy servers, AI translation. And what I found unsurprisingly was that reality and portrayal are blurred and disjunctive in our lives online and then in turn this has an effect on our lives offline. Expanding and deconstructing limits of autobiography and documentary, my dual roles of myself and my sister in the opera, as well as that of the architect, composer, writer and director, highlighted other broader issues of representation. Within so-called western artistic traditions, most notably in performance, but also within the untranslatable cultural and geographic narratives that happen even within one's own extended family.

The arias you hear are my original compositions which I sing, also you will hear sound files sent by my brother who lives in Iran, and who is studying Persian classical singing.