Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Nour Mobarak, Dafne Phono, installation view, 2024, photo by the author.
By EMMA FIONA JONES November 20, 2024
In her 1999 text, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the primary life-giving element, lamenting his neglect of air. In her current exhibition Dafne Phono, Lebanese-American artist Nour Mobarak rectifies this omission.
Mobarak’s work operates at the intersection of language, tactility, and vision, articulating the uneasy juncture of destruction and desire. Mycelium—the web of fungal strands called hyphae that break down matter and comprise an underground communication network, fusing with plant roots and forming symbiotic relationships—is often present in her work, both materially and conceptually. She draws parallels between mycelial and linguistic structures, building on histories of avant-garde sound. Her polymorphic compositions are undoubtedly in conversation with the likes of Laurie Anderson and John Cage, but seemingly grounded in the earth-body works of Ana Mendieta and Louise Bourgeois’ monuments to the monstrous feminine.
In Dafne Phono, a colossal mycelial form snakes through the air, one end rooted to the ground, with smaller, seed-pod- and stem-like sculptures clustered around it. A gelatinous, chemical-green serpent nearly the length of the gallery stretches across the floor.
The unwieldy entity that unfurls across the fourth-story Studio of the Museum of Modern Art exudes an aura of gentle protectiveness, simultaneously nurturing and fierce. Yet there is a subtle violence that suffuses the space. The disjointed sonic notes emanating from the mycelial form are hollow, almost forlorn, the aftermath of excavating the subterranean and dragging it out into the open.
Perhaps this is fitting, given the work’s narrative roots. Dafne Phono, Mobarak’s first New York museum exhibition, is a multichannel sound installation reinterpreting the first opera, Dafne. Originally staged by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598, the opera draws on the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. The myth culminates in Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree for the sake of evading Apollo’s vulturine eye.
Nour Mobarak, Dafne Phono, detail, 2024, photo by the author.
Following in its namesake’s footsteps, Dafne Fono displaces the gaze, privileging residual traces of touch and the physicality of speech over the visual. Jagged fault lines and fractured fruiting bodies of mushrooms scar the surface of the sinuous structures, marking sites of decay and sources of sound. To return to Irigaray, the decentering of sight dislocates the sovereignty of male desire. In an interview printed in Les femmes, la pornographie, l’erotisime in 1978, Irigaray explains:
More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing has brought an impoverishment of bodily relations . . . The moment the look dominates, the body loses in materiality.
The body’s materiality is imprinted not only on the mottled surface of the installation, but within the mechanized stream of multilingual voices emanating from its core. The interplay of substance and sound calls attention to the demands that speech makes on the body, and the sonic dimension of organic matter. Sound is often subsumed into the practice of consumption—more often than not, music and auditory information are delivered to us via streamlined, standardized devices designed to impart a sense of control, social status, or efficiency on the listener. The sound itself adheres to a standard tempo cleansed of irregularities and sequential variations.
In Mobarak’s hands, however, the air is alive with chance encounters and enigmatic harmonies. Automated voices recount the tale of Daphne and Apollo in an unlikely chorus of some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages. Chatino, Taa, and Abkhaz intertwine with Silbo Gomero, the whistling language of the Canary Islands. The resulting libretto, translated back into English, flashes across a screen installed at the far end of the space. Fluctuations in narrative and tone ricochet off the bodies of visitors moving around and between the sculptures.
The mycelial form that encases the sound system is testament to the materiality of air. Emitting millions of spores a day, mushrooms belong to the air as much as to the earth. Overlooking midtown Manhattan through floor-to-ceiling windows, the mass of fungal matter hovering awkwardly above the city is an unexpected reminder of our own groundlessness.
Nour Mobarak, Dafne Phono, detail, 2024, photo by the author.
The installation provides corporeal and sonic dimension to the mycological discourse that has begun to trickle into queer studies in recent years. Mycelium lace through the work of researchers Patricia Kaishian and Hasmik Djoulakian, for instance, structuring inquiries into mutualism, cultural repulsion, collective survival, and sites of desire. Mobarak’s work, in its biological and mythological explorations of bodily transmutation, is an uncertain requiem to acts of generative self-annihilation.
Dafne Phono makes visible the phantom voices and moments of muscle memory that form the periphery of longing. Yet it is most potent in the instances that it allows to remain hidden. Irigaray writes,
Our eyes are not capable of seeing, nor even contemplating, intimacy. . .They can only imagine something about intimacy from the light, the gestures, the words, that it radiates. But intimacy as such will remain invisible. . .except in its delusion, its lack, its derelictions and artificial ecstasies. Intimacy allows itself neither to be seen nor to be seized. Nevertheless it is probably the core of our being. And any attempts to appropriate it risks annihilating being itself.
Veiled in crumbling substrates and a tangle of tongues, the work remains at the precipice of fruition, always almost within reach. WM
Emma Fiona Jones is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She holds a BA from Vassar College in art history and women's studies and an MFA in studio art from Stony Brook University. Her work examines queerness, femininity, and reproduction.
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