A choir

1

Among Abrahamic traditions, a blessing, or barakah, is believed to come directly from the divine.

A blessing may arise in fragments over time. Sometimes I have to walk to the ocean and look at it for hours in order to understand how a promise can materialise and where it may have come from.

Etel Adnan once said, to look at the sea is to become what one is, and I believe her. 

Systems of divination have been used for centuries as a source of guidance or resolve. The ideas of being blessed and gaining insight are often intertwined.

In an attempt to organise ourselves, we make instruments for identifying patterns, to foresee or prophesise.

A map of a room, revealing cards, the melting of lead. Tools for understanding, tessellating, and navigating how to move through.

I look in the mirror and wonder for a moment if I have become the room or if it’s an optical illusion.

It’s easy to forget that a mirror reflects light and not the object.

Both Wassila Abboud and Abrir individually ask us to consider what it means to have a shared feeling: what is an echo chamber? Where do I begin and where do you end?

Resemblance does not always signify interrelation.

Nature communicates in patterns, and as humans, we have the desire to find structure in the information coming our way.

We may see similarities between a leaf and a rock formation, convert the data into an equation, and it becomes a kind of law.

Reflection, by the condition of physics, requires light. 

Our gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a desire of a powerful force to become and behave like something else, Abboud says.

2

If looking at the sea is to become what one is, then we may see the ocean as a guide back to ourselves. 

Ma’ata Halaifonua-Palu and Benjamin Akuila understand this.

In the first iteration of Angel Currency in 2023, Halaifonua-Palu articulated the reciprocal relation between a close understanding of nature and one’s faith.

FAKATAHA speaks to us the same, wherein Kanekalon hair, wool and a pandanus leaf mat are woven and braided in an act of symbolising the bind between self and place.

Ta’engata states through a prayer song, God says he will cast our sins into the depths of the ocean, maybe that’s why I have faith I’ll find you again. The ocean brought us together once, it will bring us together again.

In other words, they’re telling me that nature is a blessed being.

The tradition of sung prayer dates back over millennia, with liturgical music starting in chant.

Devotional, choral chanting as a way to attunement, to be involved in what is beyond you, with the voice allowing you to feel the interchange in your body.

Fatima Al Qadiri believes the human voice to be the most pure instrument. Because it’s part of the human body [and] it’s also the instrument capable of the greatest sounds of longing. She goes on to say, At least, this is what I hear in devotional chanting: this longing for an answer, longing for salvation, longing for reassurance.

3 

In her debut visual artwork Bayrout Wal-Banat, Céline Skaf speaks to the urgency of documenting everyday life on video, amid the rampant loss.

On the TV, three figures walk down separate streets but side by side. The women drink and sing to each other, understanding that time feels different when it is shared.

She asks her friend, may I help you? and they drive into the sun. I can’t quite discern if the sun is rising or setting, all I know is the light is orange.

Skaf demonstrates the importance of reconstructing feelings into a story for ourselves. Loss itself is not a divine event.

It is an exercise in imagination combined with timekeeping, and it can soothe what the artist calls the ‘painful ephemerality’ of what it means to be in relation to another person.

I can tell when the person behind the camera recognises their subject, by the angle chosen to capture and how the light hits her hair. 

I do not know the figures I am watching, but I don’t need to in order to understand that relation is never a static event.

I make up my own story about these characters and their friendships.

I tell myself when the sky turns dark and she spots the precise brightness of a star, she is reminded that destiny is cyclical and is always approaching. 

4

Ritual may be characterised by a gesture, a word or an action, prescribed by tradition of a community.

One may indiscriminately assemble pages of a historical account on a table and magically, it is reconfigured into a new story.

Through archival still images and clips of the hala tree, Keanahala offers us a glimpse into the sacred practice of weaving, accompanied by song and the sound of staccato rain.

Keanahala literally translates to the hala cave, referencing old stories of weavers who found shelter from the sun in cool, damp caves to weave.

A year on from hala dreamz, as night approaches, I stand at the same window watching Fantasy Hoses breathe under the flood of red light.

Skye Bakhos reimagines the ritual of Argileh into a playful landscape adorned in faux fur. Bakhos reminds me that we are in a constant state of becoming and it is something to be embraced.

I see Adnan appear again. To look at the sea is to become what one is.

Angel Currency is more than a site of gathering or interchange.

It passes in and out of the present, calling upon different time scales, whether it’s geological, thermal or rhythmic.

Each voice has a resonance that rings true, and regardless of the instruments presented, faith is the common note.