We Slip and Sway Away
Sophia Al-Maria

Beneath the thin air and thick stars of Aspen, Sophia Al-Maria joins forces with musician Davia Spain to summon an otherworldly transmission—part séance, part song-cycle, part science-fictional lament. Spiralling outward from Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It—a theoretical livewire that reimagines what life is, where it begins, and how it might speak—the performance also catches the ricochet of Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death, where time loops and bodies become battlegrounds for meaning.

Through speculative world-building, feminist sonics, and metaphysical fieldwork, Al-Maria continues her search for frequencies beneath the flesh. Is translation a mode of survival—or a leak in the veil? How is a body the soul’s camouflage? What form does a thought take when it slips the mind?  What disappears without vanishing? And in a world obsessed with presence, what kind of death does art rehearse—again and again—in order to stay alive?

Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist and writer whose work across video art and screenwriting envisions revisionist histories and multi-polar narratives of life on earth. In a multidisciplinary art practice that expands into collage, performance and installation, the foundation of Al-Maria’s work lies in questioning the intersections between those in power and those who are ‘othered.’ She is particularly known for the concept of “Gulf Futurism,” a term she coined to describe the force behind rapid fossil-fuelled development in the late 20th and early 21st century Gulf, where oil extraction brought unprecedented urban development and issues of inequality and environmental devastation. Her 2012 memoir and 2016 film The Girl Who Fell to Earth reflects her personal experiences of alienation growing up between the Pacific Northwest, Qatar and Egypt. Her more recent collection of writings Sad Sack (Book Works, 2019) and Sad Sack II (Book Works, 2024), uses her own journey as a writer to investigate the various ways in which the future is unevenly distributed or misunderstood. In 2024, Al-Maria collaborated with artist Lydia Ourahmane on Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol—an exhibition that examined the myths of England as a nation and the precarities of being an immigrant in the country. Al-Maria’s works have also been recently exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); GARAGE, Moscow (2021); Julia Stoschek, Dusseldorf (2020); and Tate Britain, London (2019).

Davia Spain is an American musician, performance artist, and filmmaker whose work harnesses Afrofuturist themes of time travel, multi-dimensionality, and circular time theory to imagine new possibilities for existence. Her performances and recordings collapse genre boundaries to create immersive and speculative soundscapes rooted in transformation, survival, and transcendence. Spain’s debut album Dawning (2020) is an amalgamation of ambient, jazz, classical, R&B and electronic music that narrates the journey of a woman sent from an underwater civilization to heal Earth, reflecting the artist’s engagement with themes of spirituality, rebirth, and circular time. Spain’s work has been presented at venues such as The Broad, Los Angeles (2020); Berkeley Art Museum (2019), REDCAT, Los Angeles (2019); and The Regent Theater, Los Angeles (2019); and she has performed internationally in cities including Montreal, Mexico City, and Berlin. As a filmmaker, she has contributed to projects such as the sci-fi film Transfinite (2019) and the documentary How to Make a Rainbow (2019). In parallel to her artistic work, Spain also serves as a consultant for organizations like LA County and San Francisco’s Transgender Cultural District promoting trans-inclusive practices and reshaping institutional approaches to equity and representation.

Image: Serpentine Park Nights 2021: Tosh Basco, NO SKY. Photo: Inès Manai.