saba hasan reads her poems

performance art video

This video ‘Saba Hasan Reads Her Poems’ ( 6 mins ) was made for a performance festival in which i read my poems on racial profiling, sexism, state oppression, love, conflict, violence, survival and hope. The note i prefer to hold is largely universal. ‘Rehearsal for a Poem’ was written while at a residency in Salzburg, read out to visitors as an unplanned performance, then installed as a recording at a large gate in the Hohenburg Castle. ‘The Two of Us’ is a protest against the criminalization of homosexuality and other mores regulating love and desire. Rain is like a departing sigh and is i think on the experience of dying. The poems were written in the last four years and set up originally as voice/sound Installations and Rain also as a separate video.
My voice works are in English, which is translocated from Urdu carrying within it perhaps a desire to belong to many worlds. My homeless language is a paradox of connections between places that I have lived in like Russia, India, America, Switzerland, France and a mystifying preoccupation with songs, I have heard being called ghazals. From Tagore as much as from Pushkin, Ghalib or Lorca, I have learnt to speak in a voice invoking many myths.