Saturdays @ WMC | Tour of The Watermill Center & Open Rehearsal with Sahra Motalebi

Tour | The Watermill Center | 4pm - 5:30pm
Walk through history with a guided tour of The Watermill Center building, grounds, gardens, art collection and study library. The Watermill Collection contains over 8,000 pieces representing all continents and many eras, from the stone age to the present. Housed in a place where performers, artists and scientists from different cultures and disciplines come to collaborate, the Watermill Collection serves as an inspiration for creative practice. Situated on eight-acres of land, The Watermill Center is surrounded by verdant lawns and outdoor sculpture, meditation and rooftop gardens.

Open Rehearsal | Sahra Motalebi | 6pm - 8pm

Visual artist, composer and vocalist Sahra Motalebi will continue her work on Rendering What Remains, a 40 minute opera that includes multiple staged performances, video, sculpture installations and a novella. While at Watermill, Motalebi will further develop a section of the piece’s musical dialog called Flesh, Format. As part of the larger project, the piece explores the inner lives of two sisters living in dissimilar circumstances 100 years from now -- orbiting themes of spiritual ritual, loss, interiority, as well as the indeterminate contours of relationally and intimacy in the digital age. Semi-autobiographical, the libretto is based on a year-long period of online communication between Motalebi and her sister living in Iran, to whom she bares a striking resemblance but has never met in person. Motalebi plays both herself and her sibling, utilizing experimental musical structure, narrative chorus, and visual dramaturgy to move between these two characters imaging each other.

Motalebi will present this work in an open rehearsal at The Watermill Center on Feb 20th at 6pm and at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY on February 25th at 10pm.

Sahra Motalebi is a visual artist, composer and vocalist. Her projects lay at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture and performance through which she explores the construction of narrative and its artifacts. Her work has been shown internationally at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum Ludwig, Abrons Art Center, Vancouver Art Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. In 2008, Motalebi’s multi-channel video installation and vocal performance Such is the Game of Authenticity was performed at MoMA PS1. Intangible Heritages, Belief’s Demise was presented at SculptureCenter in 2014 and she performed Sounds from Untitled Skies at The Kitchen in New York in 2015. Motalebi has also contributed to many collaborative projects including I Will Be Last with artist Kai Althoff in 2008 at Vancouver Art Gallery. The artist also performed with Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons) in 2008 at the premier of Hegarty’s release of Another World. Her collaboration with Mariah Robertson Life is God’s Musical: 4 Movements was performed at the Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012 for the Art in Embassies, US State Department’s 50 Year Anniversary. Motalebi produced Yves Klein’s Monotone Silence Symphony presented by Dominique Lévy and the Yves Klein archive in 2013. She scored Settlement House, a four-hour dance piece by Will Rawls, at the Abrons Art Center in 2015. The artist studied classical vocal performance, visual art, and art and architectural history at Sarah Lawrence College. She attended the Master of Architecture Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture focusing on the relationship between architecture, performance and visual art. Motalebi lives in New York.

Reservations for both events can be made at watermillcenter.org/events.

Photo Credits: Portrait image by Tina Tyrell; above Matthew Spiegelman and Sahra Motalebi