Image by Selwa Abd.
RSVP ($10 suggested donation)
If you wish to forego the donation please contact nick@issueprojectroom.org to RSVP.
Co-presented with ISSUE Project Room and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, multi-disciplinary artist, musician, designer and 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Selwa Abd (Bergsonist) performs a new work titled As If Reality? Following her previous work-in-progress presentations of the piece on Governors Island and online in June 2022, Bergonist is presenting a new iteration alongside projections of 360 footage and visual fragments captured in Morocco in the summer of 2022.
Selwa Abd’s Bergsonist project follows a creative approach based on intuition & fragment-based systems. Her new works are interested in building worlds (sonic & visual) as simulations set up for extending creative research and speculations on the future that awaits us. Selwa has noted that “I've always been working in fragments, whether in design or music,” and her work often delves into a prolific archive of hours of sonic and visual exploration. Often working with micro-drafts that become essential toward assembling later works, Selwa focuses on a conceptual use of fragments and intuition as ways of altering scales of perception to further understand sonic and visual mediums. These fragments are explorations scaled within the tensions between the actual/virtual that have become a signature of the Bergsonist project.
Selwa Abd is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician & designer living in NYC (originally from Morocco). Under the guise of Bergsonist, she uses a variety of media to investigate social resonance through divergent conceptual aesthetics (minimalism and musique concrète to name a few). Selwa’s extended creative practice uses intuition & fragment-based systems as legitimate and only modi operandi. Through her work, she explores notions of identity, memory, and social politics. She is the founder of the community resource Pick Up The Flow. She hosts a monthly music show on NTS Radio and a podcast featuring inspiring creatives from the PUTF community and beyond. In 2020, her first full length album / sonic autobiography: “Middle Ouest” was released via Optimo Music. She also scored the award winning film “Jmar” by Samy Sidali which got featured at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2022.
Selwa Abd’s ISSUE Project Room residency was supported by Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program for artists (TIP) and is part of an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.
ISSUE Project Room residency events are free to the public. Due to limited capacity at many venues, and to ensure RSVP attendance, ISSUE requests a $10 suggested donation is coordinated in order to secure the RSVP. In the instance that an audience member wishes to forego the donation please contact nick@issueprojectroom.org.
Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.