Performance time 20.30 Performance time 20.30
Reza Mirabi
/Dance/
A 14-second video of the last bird of its species singing for a mate who will never come inspired Mirabi’s Language of the Birds, an early sharing of research that interweaves myth, ecology, and crisis into a performance installation. Drawing from Attar of Nishapur’s 12th-century poem ﻣﻧطق اﻟطﯾر (Mantiq ut-Tayr: Language of the Birds), the project hones in on human connections to birds: Gaza’s bird watchers Mandy and Lara Sirdah, New Delhi’s bird doctor Nadeem Shehzad, and Kalki from the Nicobar Islands, who heeded birds’ warnings to survive the 2004 tsunami. Collaborating with vocalist Samin Ghorbani, and multi-instrumentalist Klyl Shifron and Ana Costa, Mirabi channels these narratives into a new mythology, invoking the language of birds as a haunting guide through our times.
Reza Mirabi is an artist whose work is informed by ecological and socio-political projects in Europe and the SWANA region. After graduating with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Mumbai in 2012 and completing the DAS Choreography master's program in Amsterdam in 2021, Mirabi has rooted his practice in the belief that everything—every place, being, and material—carries an inherent story to tell. Rather than overwriting these, he investigates forms of listening that weave us into their more-than-human narratives.