Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono
Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono
For her first museum exhibition in New York City, Lebanese American artist Nour Mobarak presents a large-scale installation reinterpreting the first opera, Dafne.
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MoMA
October 26, 2024 to January 12, 2025
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Exhibition Details

For her first museum exhibition in New York City, Lebanese American artist Nour Mobarak presents a large-scale installation reinterpreting the first opera, Dafne, which was staged by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598 and inspired by Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne. In Mobarak’s reimagining of Dafne, 15 singing sculptures—encasing a multichannel sound installation within mycelium structures—recount the tale in some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages.

Additional Details

Building on histories of avant-garde sound, Mobarak’s most ambitious work to date draws on a longstanding interest in mechanized voice and memory across her practice, which ranges from sculpture to performance, moving image, poetry, and music. In Dafne Phono, Mobarak draws analogies between linguistic structure and the biological processes of mycelium, exploring how both are governed by systems of repetition, decomposition, and regeneration, and relate to wider forces of political power.

Location

MoMA
11 West 53 Street, Manhattan
New York, NY 10019

Image: Installation view, Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono, Municipal Theatre of Piraeus, 2023 / photo by Stathis Mamalakis