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Wonders of the Moon - A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking (2020) - video installation (projection on cone-shaped wooden structure covered with curved plasterboard), asynchronous audio-video playback (video 21 minutes, audio 47 minutes looped), music track by waterhouse, narration performed by Davis Freeman, in collaboration with Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Goda Palekaitė

Commissioned and produced by WIELS, exhibited in the context of Risquons-Tout, Brussels September 2020, Brussels September 2020 - January 2021
Exhibited in TEN SLOTTE 5 by Out Of Sight, Antwerp December 2021

Grounded on artistic research in medieval cosmologies, Wonders of the Moon - A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking is a video-installation imagined to be a lunar montage machine to render a series of misplaced narratives of shape-shifting and delirious figures in the middle ages from West Asia, a cabinet of curiosities that is dealing with the dark. It consists of figures, associations, atmospheres, and imageries that are inspired by the speculative science of bestiaries, a premodern world of horror-wonder literature. Bestiaries are medieval practices of description that were preoccupied with the monsters, marvels, and irregularities of the nature, encompassing a wider poetics of Muslim imaginal ecological consciousness.

We close our eyes in order to simulate (and make ourselves available to) the time of darkness: a phenomenological atmospheric attuning to an entirely anonymous, indifferent, and inhuman nature of the cosmos. Dark has been both the medium of worship and of deviation. It is where the forgetter (the conspirator), the sleepwalker (the associator), the eraser (the sorcerer), and the smuggler (the polluter) are active. It is the time when they are at work. After-dark is the underground of time, as Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, the philosopher of deception and masks, proposes. It is where something other and something horror can happen. In crossing the dark, certain figures (shadow, moon, jinn, nature, God) of the premodern Indo-Persian world dissolve into familiar shapes and have a dynamic of disruptive presence within human world.


Over-layering images, assemblage, and research activated by a baroque style of speculation, a carnivalesque imagery of formfullness (not formlessness) in style, of prototype-after-prototype (mixed-media motion graphic) of epistemic variations, and a narratively structured epic (not dramatic) landscape of visual and textual material.
View of the video installation 'Wonders of the Moon – A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking' by Sina Seifee, exhibited in WIELS 2020 Brussels An excerpt 3D simulation of the video installation 'Wonders of the Moon – A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking' by Sina Seifee, exhibited in WIELS 2020 Brussels top view of the film projection view of the video installation 'Wonders of the Moon - A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking' Sina Seifee 2020 WIELS

© 2020 Sina Seifee WIELS WIELS