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Read exhibition reviews for
This Phenomenal Overlay by Sahra Motalebi on Art Agenda, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Guide Art.

“In a series of voice sculptures or “speculative instruments,” Motalebi questions the assumed neutrality of technology, beginning with an excavation of the somewhat defunct term motherboard. “A haunting linguistic artifact, a modern word with no origins,” the artist recites from a self-authored intertextual script that slowly untangles the “imbrication of technology in life;” the biological and gendered implications of the “dead metaphor” rehearsed in a flat, detached tone, her voice emerging from a speaker nestled within the artworks.” — Dina A. Ramadan The Brooklyn Rail

“Questions rather than answers,” Motalebi warns, guarding against hasty conclusions. Instead, in her script, she turns to recurring motifs like motherboards, a subject that has animated the artist’s recent research. This piece of hardware is the central node of the digital circuit to which all other hardware attaches. As centralized nodes of connectivity, motherboards offer Motalebi a vibrant metaphor for relationality, proximity, and intimacy—dynamics which have been wildly reconfigured by our accelerated use of virtual and digital platforms during the time the artist developed this new body of work.” — Rachel Valinsky, Art Agenda.

“Opera emanates from a speaker hidden in a silver-sheathed stool; double helixes climb up laddered railings; and a burst of gray matter, like a leaking brain, blooms from the corner of the gallery.” — Lisa Yin Zhang, The Guide Art.

Sahra Motalebi
This Phenomenal Overlay

January 28 - March 12, 2022
Brief Histories, New York

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Brief Histories presents This Phenomenal Overlay, a solo exhibition by Sahra Motalebi, opening January 28, 2022, and on view until March 12, 2022.

In This Phenomenal Overlay, multiple scenes unfold simultaneously in an installation of set paintings and voice-sculptures. In one scene, analog instruments are reconfigured as future relics that upend categories of knowledge, complicating our assumptions about the voice and artistic production. In another scene, the artist's search for the etymologies of technological terms reveals historical forces and frameworks embedded in technology itself. The movement between the scenes of This Phenomenal Overlay traces the network of an archive through meaning-making and connection. With its own production at the fore, the exhibition continually reimagines and reworks its own processes in real-time.

As in Motalebi's previous performance-exhibitions and operas, This Phenomenal Overlay works across multiple registers of duration, material, and media. Evoking unexpected narrative forms and unlikely scenographic spaces in her projects, the artist offers the 'disjunctive' as a mode that creates multiple sites of possibility. Motalebi says, "I set up scenarios that allow for poetic experiments, within the work itself, but also within what an exhibition often entails, interrupting the logics of performativity and staging."

This multi-year project was developed during Motalebi's residency at the Chinati Foundation in 2020 and a fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute in 2021. Motalebi's current iterative text-based project Drawing on the Breath has been excerpted and published by Brief Histories Press (2020) and in Harvard Divinity School's journal Peripheries (2021). Special thanks to Caroline Coolidge, Fernando Delgado, Erwin Karl, at Louis Place, Wendy Webster.

Sahra Motalebi is an artist, vocalist, and writer. Her projects have been shown, and she has performed work at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, New Museum, SculptureCenter, Swiss Institute, and participated in the 79th Whitney Biennial in 2019. She has been an artist in residence at Chinati Foundation, Villa Empain, Watermill Center, and Yaddo. Motalebi has collaborated with Sophia Al Maria, Sibyl Kempson, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Will Rawls, Asad Raza. She lives and works in New York.

Sahra Motalebi
This Phenomenal Overlay

January 28 - March 12, 2022
Brief Histories • New York City

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