Presentation: Arshia Haq, On seeing with one’s ears: seeking sama’

Arshia Haq
On seeing with one’s ears: seeking sama’
Saturday, January 21, 4pm

Arshia Haq, Euphoria of Devotion at the Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalander – Sehwan, Sindh, Pakistan, 2017

I gave up my music because I had received from it all I had to receive…I had composed songs, I sang and played the vina; and practicing this music, I arrived at a stage where I touched the music of the spheres. Then every soul became for me a musical note and all life became music.

I played the vina until my heart turned into this same instrument; then I offered this instrument to the Divine Musician, the only Musician existing. Since then I have become His flute, and when He chooses He plays His music. People give me credit for this music, which in reality is not due to me, but to the Musician who plays on His own instrument.

— Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music (1923)

Arshia Fatima Haq conducts a listening session that explores Sufi devotional music and the concept of sama’: a spiritual atmosphere established through the relationship between performer and audience, a state of ecstasy or absorption that can transform consciousness. Haq first experienced sama’ in her early years, before she had words for it, at the storied shrine known as Yousufain Dargah in Hyderabad, where her family have been members for generations. It was this early memory that she pursued on her journeys to shrines in rural Sindh and Punjab, Pakistan from 2013 to 2017, where many of the most celebrated spiritual musicians and saints of the subcontinent lived, composed, sang, and remain consecrated.

During this session, Haq will play recordings that she and others have made of performances at shrines in this region and the greater SWANA geography, through which many of the saints traveled in itinerancy, as well as music by modern composers reinterpreting the genre. She will also share passages from Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music (1923) and from Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding The Raga (2021), and speak about her own experiences of listening at shrines and in clubs, as well as the complexities of documenting those untranslatable experiences. Haq proposes that sama’ be understood metaphorically as a liminal sonic space that encourages transcendence, and that might manifest in (or between) formalized rituals and more inclusive, fluid spaces.

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India) is a Los Angeles-based artist who works across film, visual art, performance, and sound. She works through counter-archives and speculative narratives, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment, mysticism, indigenous and localized knowledge within the context of Sufism. Haq is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project and record label working with cultural production from South and West Asia and North Africa. She hosts and produces monthly radio shows on NTS. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, nightclubs, and in the streets, and have been featured at the Broad Museum, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), the Hammer Museum (all Los Angeles); Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Toronto International Film Festival; and NPR; among others. Haq received an MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts.