UM-Astre Fruitier

Zad Moultaka
UM (sovereign engine of all things), 2016
sound recording, 36 minutes on loop

UM is a project that takes its source from the energy and the sound space
of the Tibetan rituals. This theme has been repeatedly explored and
exploited, often for pseudo-spiritual or dangerous media purposes. Here,
it is not about the monks themselves, about proselytism, apology or any
political position towards the Tibetan tragedy, but rather about a look at
our own declining civilization and questioning our relationship to the
sacred.
It is urgent to question the spiritual in our increasingly empty and
materialistic society. I wanted to do it through the work of UM based on
the text of Bardo, the Tibetan book of the dead, avoiding the fantasies of
Tibet, its monks and monasteries. Monks are a kind of spiritual engine to
their society, is there a correspondence in ours? An intuition that seemed
naive appeared to me: what if I literally question the engine? Symbol of
speed, noise, pollution … I then took a 12-second sample of a Maserati
engine that I slowed to the extreme, up to about 10 minutes. By isolating
the low frequencies then the high frequencies, strange voices appear
intriguingly like the voices of the Tibetan monks or a celestial choir. And if
we slowed down our pace and the excitement in which we live, would we
find a new spirituality?
– Zad Moultaka

THE SHADOW
Collective Exhibition
March 5 – May 30, 2020
TOTAH Gallery
183, Stanton Street New York 1002, USA

Artists: David Austen, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Aleksandar Duravcevic, Mara De Luca, TR Ericsson, Greg Haberny, James Hyde, Melissa McGill, Zad Moultaka, Philip Mueller, Luca Pancrazzi, Kenny Scharf, Victor Schrager, Alex Sewell, Saul Steinberg, Nick Terry, and Jason Bard Yarmosky

UM (sovereign engine of all things)
sound recording, 36 minutes on loop

Astre Fruitier
photography