Mobarak’s long established parallel investigations of organic and inorganic material resolutely shifts toward the latter category in this new body of work. Following a three-year commitment to developing and producing Dafne Phono, a large-scale sculptural installation based on the first opera ever written – recently presented at The Piraeus Municipal Theater, Greece, and MoMA, New York – “I wanted to do something that would allow me to just immerse myself back into the corporeal, into my body,” says the artist, “while also performing some kind of irreverent gesture… The impulse, the gesture is somewhat absurd, but then there's something deeply serious about just falling into complete exploration of form.” Simply put, the work also emerged as a reaction to the increasingly unsettling geopolitical situation of the world. “Every artistic action, every political gesture I could think of seemed to fall short confronted to the gravity of what is happening,” says Mobarak, so a direct bodily print as both the source and expressive content of a work has an unquestionable quality that felt appropriate.
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