Opening Reception with Meter & Light: Day

For the opening night of the residency, Recess Session artist Zain Alam will screen Meter & Light: Day, the first part of his ongoing installation series, completed earlier this year. Following will be a musical performance by Slowspin, a Pakistani American musician and collaborator on the Night installment.

Meter & Light is an aesthetic inquiry into the rhythmic foundations that fashion senses of time as lived by Muslims. Drawing upon artist Zain Alam’s training in Islamic studies and as a composer, this multi-channel audio/video installation depicts the cyclical measures used to mark the passage of light, seasons, and spiritual revelation.

The 20 minute, 3-channel audiovisual installation will continue to play on loop through the evening, and be on view to the public for the following week until October 18. After which, he will work with collaborators Sam B. Jones, Zeerak Ahmed / SLOWSPIN, and Warren Hilldebrand to produce the second installment in the series Meter & Light: Night over the course of the Session.

Zeerak Ahmed / SLOWSPIN is a New York based Pakistani artist. She produces voice-based sculptures, sound installations and uniquely fragile sound collages that explore notions of identity, memory and longing. Slowspin has a distinct sound practice grounded in Hindustani classical vocal traditions, dream-folk, ambient and experimental-electronic music. Poetry and melodies in her mother tongue(s)—Urdu, Farsi, Purbi and English—build new textural soundscapes. She has released six EP’s and one collaborative album, Talisman. Over the last five years she has been looking closely at her family's native region of pre-partition Uttar Pradesh, archiving the sonic and intellectual histories of folk music traditions from the zenana (the private quarters of women). Her first U.S. solo exhibition, Mother I Am Compelled to Leave / اماّں میں تو پاہونی, is on view at the Akron Art Museum until December 29, 2024. Ahmed is currently teaching and advising for Transart Institute's PhD and MFA program, and is working on a new release with her New York based quartet, which includes guitarist Grey Mcmurray, drummer Marlon Patton, and Grammy nominated multi-instrumentalist, Shahzad Ismaily.