UB artist's exhibit utilizes sound, songs to convey complex stories from Silk Road

Chen explains that in SRS, the songs about land, sovereignty and cultural identity have been created in collaboration with musicians in communities along the route; it is they who control selection of landscapes, musical genres and lyrical content. For each place, their voices are the dynamic driving force, and the land is the visual anchor.

“The history of land becomes invisible over time, competing occupiers erase history, nature reclaims territory. Songs enable us to mourn, remember, protest and declare, turning sorrow and outrage into hope, fortitude and joy. Songs become a ready vehicle for voices that are not usually heard. Singing builds fortitude, singing together builds collective joy and defiance. These are songs of empowerment, channels for human agency,” Chen says.

“Arzu and I share a commitment to social justice in our individual art practices. We’ve each created numerous past performative works that tap into the potency of participatory action to generate social commentary. This is the most ambitious, challenging project that we have each undertaken.

“We harness our respective ancestries and migration stories to geographically tether the project route, forming an itinerary that is historically and personally significant,” she says. “Working on SRS, particularly during this pandemic, reinforces how porous and fragile our world is. What reverberates half a globe away unsettles us here, and vice versa. We are susceptible, even if we don’t travel, migrate or venture out of our comfort zone. We must confront our hubris in realizing how deeply and intimately we affect one another. An effective means is by sharing stories with people who live(d) far away or long ago.”

Chen and Ozkal are building a network of participants to work collaboratively across borders and disciplines, amplifying their ideas about land and song. Collaborators include musicians, artists and ethnomusicologists who are from diverse ethnic communities spanning Turkey, Iran, Uzbekistan and China, and who speak multiple languages, including Turkish, Farsi, Uzbek, Crimean Tatar, Russian, Armenian, Uyghur, Hui and Mandarin.

“We’re folding traditional knowledge and practices into contemporary forms of expression, working to ensure that knowledgeable, respectful representation and acknowledgements are made regarding use of traditional musical genres, literary material and linguistic/cultural intellectual property,” Chen says. “Our collaborators have deep connections to the musical and literary traditions that they practice/research; they steer SRS regarding the selection and use of appropriate source material.”

Chen and Ozkal managed to use remote communication to complete the video production and rough-cut post-production for three of the five SRS locations. The first work-in-progress installation was recently mounted — by directing remotely — at OCAT Xi’an. Based on the material produced to date, they will create a work-in-progress single-channel video to be shown in Vancouver in late spring. They are now preparing to work on production for Tehran and Kashgar.

According to Chen, the completed SRS project will be presented internationally via multiple physical and digital communities and presenting institutions.

“We intend for SRS to be distributed in as many ways and forms as possible, including via video streaming and sharing of songs, and private screenings in remote places where public screening is impossible,” she says.

In order to serve multilingual audiences, written translations will be integrated into all final components of SRS.

“Our goal is to build a network of artists who can creatively, ethically and safely collaborate across difficult borders and together strategize for dissemination, circulation and distribution in order to maximize access and shareability of SRS for all project collaborators and their respective communities,” Chen says.