Past and Future Forms is a performance with individual and collaborative sets that weave through each other initiated by interdisciplinary-sound artist Sholeh Asgary with interdisciplinary video artist-scholar Dena Al-Adeeb, visual-performance artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and dance-sound-performance artist Leyya Mona Tawil. Through the lens of SWANA (South-West Asia, North Africa) experimentalism in sound and performance, the project explores cyclical time and the optics of visibility in relation to the body as a past and future form, shaped by foreign policy, crude oil and water.
The virtual Fall 2020 presentation of Past and Future Forms utilizes the body as an additive and subtractive element through video-animation, sound and movement. Using the Epic of Gilgamesh as a departure point, this performance is an excavation of the symbolic physical language that is to culminate in the final future.