Sahar Tehrani
My work mobilizes methods that open up alternative realities and challenge common approaches to “original” content. My interactions with multiple cultures and geographies bring me to question the notion of absolute truth and leads me to explore the role of past narrativization as it shapes the future. My interventions range from language and semiotics, social dynamics and ethics, to media studies and oral histories. Through each project, I engage in socio-political and techno-political discourses to understand hegemony within different power structures.
My most recent body of work is focused on the sonic interventions and installations that investigate the evolutions in the melodic patterns of human languages as a primary step in the development of human thinking and by extension, social behavior. In addition to this investigative
lens of semantics, I look at the various ways in which the musicality of speech [i.e. intonations and phonetics] is itself as much a material for human communication as syntax and practical lexicography. More specifically, my primary investigations recently have been focused on the different ways in which humans behave in crowds, and the extent to which soundscapes shape the material architecture of multiple bodies in proximity to each other, In other words, the collective motions of human crowds through the sonic ambiance encasing them.
The overarching goals in my practice are to create the conditions whereby my audience can contemplate the fact that within the ambiguity of a “post-truth” context, meaning is often derived from the performative qualities of language rather than the words’ denotative or connotative interpretations.