Film screening, Mixed Media Reading, Music | Six Days of Love
The Love of Djinns
With houaïda, Michael Salu and Nilita Vachani
Pallavi Paul, How Love Moves: Prelude, Gropius Bau (2023) photo: Luca Girardini
This year’s public programme Six Days of Love accompanying How Love Moves: Prelude, an installation by Artist in Residence Pallavi Paul, continues with The Love of Djinns. Returning to the beginnings of cinema as a medium of magic and awe, The Love of Djinns activates the Gropius Bau’s cinema space through a polyphonous programme including film, reading and performance with houaïda, Michael Salu and Nilita Vachani. Through eerie compositions of sound, performance and image, the live contributions create a place for internal listening, invoking what resides outside the “visible” realm within the presences and resonances of djinns, aqueous spirit beings as well as geologic memories.
Following a screening of Nilita Vachani’s documentary Eyes of Stone (1990) addressing spirit possession, resistance of patriarchal order and communal healing in rural Rajasthan, the evening continues with the multisensory cinematic-reading Listening to the Red Earth by writer and artist Michael Salu from his latest literary work Red Earth (2023). Hosting what appears to be a radio show, Salu takes listeners on a journey speaking to unheard voices across eras and times, revealing how the personal relates to planetary scale. Inviting the audience to further dwell into spectral rhythms, devotional textures and hopeful laments, composer, performer and scientist houaïda concludes the programme in The Love of Spirits Sounding Worlds – A Devotion through a dream-walk into sonic portals of unpredictable and aqueous worlds.