Tuesday 16 October 2018, 7.30pm
Sadaf H Nava is an Iranian composer, violinist and visual artist whose multidisciplinary interventions include sound, video, performance and text. SADAF’s visuals, sonics, and confrontational performative tactics dawned from the noise/DIY scene in Montreal, and brought her to NYC where she currently resides and works. Oscillating between opacity and narrative, SADAF’s work aims to confound and upend the inward-looking affect inherent to contemporary performance, simultaneously drawing from and subverting the language of auto-fiction, cinema and the artist/muse relationship. Her original compositions and DJ sets present a mélange of intuitive and clashing material inspired by contemporary global archaeologies of sound. After releasing several singles on Brooklyn based label HOSS records, as well as a self shot and directed visual mix-tape for Dis Magazine called DROWN IT, SADAF released her debut EP SHELL on LA based label Outside Insight.
SADAF has presented work at international festivals, museums and art spaces including: MoMa PS1 Warm Up and MoMa Sunday sessions, Issue Project Room, RBMA (Varius locations), Performa Festival in NYC, 9th Berlin Biennale, as well as Yale Union art space in Portland, Fabrica de Arte Cubano, Museum of Fine Arts Montreal, SALTS gallery Switzerland, Treize Gallery in Paris. Her work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Wire, ID magazine, FADER and the Guardian UK. SADAF continues to perform live and is currently working on a multisensory theatre adaptation of the late Maurice Blanchot’s text Awaiting Oblivion, to be presented at OCD gallery in the New Year as well as her debut full length album which is currently in the works.
In recent years, “ruined crooner” and producer, Vindicatrix has been collaborating with visual artists such as Singaporean, Ho Tzu Nyen, and London-based performance duo, New Noveta. The latter has involved working together closely on music and sound for a variety of projects, most recently for a solo show and live performance piece “Fateful” at Kunstverein, Freiburg, Germany, following “Cealdwiella” in collaboration with sonic artist Sophie Sleigh Johnson at Arcadia Missa London.
Vindicatrix and New Noveta's collaborations have involved both live processed and recorded vocalizations along with found and synthetic sounds, which accompany the duo’s elaborately costumed and choreographed struggles through anxiety, artificial contaminants and alienation.
