Over the last couple of years Sacha Kahir has been working on numerous performances, written projects and arts research. This written work has appeared in various journals including Cesura//Accesso, Mute, and most recently Ma Bibliotheque . He has also worked alongside NK Berlin in collaboration with experimental musicians including Mattin and HACKLANDER / HATAM, on a series of reading groups to translate philosophical texts into scores for performances.
Other recent work included collaborations with poet Sean Bonney on a project mixing poetry, theory, film and sound that explored what a contemporary anti-fascist aesthetics might involve. This was premiered at a conference on Ernst Bloch at the University of Warsaw and also saw a published collaboration (Letter in the Storm, The Graveside Orations of Carl Einstein, 2019.), plus several performances.
Both the above projects culminated in a 5 day event: ‘what is to be done under real subsumption?” at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 15-20/10/2018. The event saw the above artists and writers and others including Anthony Illes and Marina Vishmidt, take part in a series performances, workshops, talks and a radio show on IMA Radio, a migrant run channel in Warsaw.
Sacha has also worked on an ongoing series of projects with 'Garage', an artist run space in Berlin, with shows at Berlin Performing Arts Festival 2018 and Berlin Art Week 2019. His performances incorporate poetry, dance, vocals, music and improvisation with influences from Jooking, Voguing and Footworks, queer post punk aesthetics, and theory ranging from Autonomia to Afro-Pessimism.
Under the Social Factory Cinemamoniker Sacha has also organised screenings and events with ACE (Autonomous Centre Edinburgh), Anagram (Berlin, London) and No Money (London).
Cesura//Acceso #2
A Journal of music, performance and politics (2017)
Sacha Kahir ‘Emote Control: The State Goes Pop!’
And group piece with NK Berlin…
‘Abject Subject Ensemble – How to Practice Surgery On Yourself with Instructional Scores’
Radiant
Work in progress with Adam Read, ACUD (Berlin), Schloss Bröllin (Germany), Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria), adapting themes from Soviet era Russian Sci – Fi novel ‘Roadside Picnic’, by the Strugatsky brothers, into a series of site specific events incorporating live performance and video installation. Exploring our world, which is littered with objects, and transforming it by creating zones emanating an alien effect, where things can mutate into the miraculous, or…? Funded by Pflasterspektakel Production Scholarship 2013.
(Dis)chorus, LUX (AAP)
Nominated artist to work with 2012’s LUX Associate Artists Programme. (Dis)chorus was a group project exploring individual dissonance within the chorus of group dynamics and artistic production. It used improvisation, theory, singing, games, recording, mimicry, brewing, massage, and sometimes a hybrid mixture of these forms. Funded by The Leverhulme Trust.
What is the sound of the border?
"Human Existence Cannot Be Silent"
Paulo Freire , Pedagogy of the Oppressed
What is the sound of the Border was a series of experiments in collaborative arts practice, exploring sound and field recordings as an educational tool. Working with asylum seekers in Glasgow it built on practise developed by the international sound art collective Ultra Red, involving shared experiences of listening and recording, the project explored themes of space, language and common ground.
In collaboration with Arika, Sacha Kahir and members of Ultra Red worked at Unity Café and with residents at Red Road over the period of a year, running workshops and exploring a variety of subjects and objects with participants through recording sound around the city.
translation what is the sound of the border by everything now
The Process
Sacha Kahir | UK | 2011 | 21 minutes
The Process is a ghost story, where dead labour is resurrected through a therapeutic process. Made with a group of ex-homeless people in Dunfermline, and set in a non-place somewhere between a ghost town and the clinic. The film explores themes of memory and identity on both a personal and social level. Examining the industrial warehousing of the poor in institutions and sink estates, it uses distanciation to create a constantly shifting narrative, where the various subjective experiences of those involved intertwine.
The film was funded by the Carnegie Trust.
Negativnights - Edinburgh Printmakers
Visual and Performance Art and Curation
A series of weekly screenings of underground and experimental artist films.
Re-education: failure to adapt may lead to punitive measures being taken was a bricolage of video, sound and performance examining systems of control from religious cults to media scares to social engineering (medication was provided).
An Orgy of Appearance and Disappearance showed a series of short films followed by discussion of reality in an ever-accelerating orgy of images and what it might mean for media, politics and everyday life.
Heavy Metal Mouth - Polarcap
Visual Art - in collaboration with Hyperground
One of 13 artists invited to repsond to the following text by the participating artist Norman Shaw:
"Heavy metal culture represents an attitude which is not generally connected with fine art. Yet from cock-rock to black metal, it is an extremely nuanced, contradictory, and complex organism, mutated on currents of northern romanticism, sublime melancholy, gothic horror, expressionism, fin-de-siècle occultism, surrealist eroticism, and existential doom. From extreme violence to delicate sensitivity, from complexity to minimalism, it is a kind of anti-art with a unique identity; misanthropic, tasteless and belligerent.
Object\Subject - Pilton Video Edinburgh
Documentary
A whirlwind study of lives on the margins and in the footnotes of Edinburgh's recent history. Edinburgh - the overdeveloped world’s first city of the split personality, home of Jekyll and Hyde, reason, science, grave robbing, economics and heroin.
Edinburgh produces 90% of the world’s legal medical heroin and the programme explores the economics of heroin and the poverty industry, and how the fragments of people’s lives connect to dramatic global events.
Object/Subject is in spite of everything a testimony to the strength of ordinary people, the heroes and victims of war and addiction.
Black Sun Over Genoa - Theatre Workshop Edinburgh
Visual Art and Video Animation
Based on doccumentarty accounts, this powerful play portayed the hope, the passion,the dedication of the protestors in the face of overwhelming opposition and reveals the tragedy of a young man who made the ultimate sacrifice for his belief in a better world.
Motion Sickness - BBC
Short Film with Video Animation
Shown at the Portobello Film Festival as part of Black Eye Night
A surreal black comedy about a young Asian man in the midst of a panic attack, trapped on a train and surrounded by white Xmas shoppers. If Motion Sickness were a facial expression it would be a snarl but with tearful eyes.
