About the Project

Symmetry of Absences: A City With No Windows follows a narrator who describes a late-night walk in Manama. As the narrative unfolds, so does the intentionality, or lack thereof of his walk. Through the transformation of meaning and logic, the artist presents a tale riffing on existential nuances and the failure in highlighting patterns of understanding. The project is spread over a multichannel audiovisual work, a conversational music score, and a live performance. In developing Symmetry of Absences: A City With No Windows, Hujairi sifted through notes he had taken from different sources: thoughts and observations from his personal late night walking practice, oral histories collected from Bahraini folk musicians, his audiovisual research archive, and extrapolations from his practice as a composer-sound artist. The compilation is an invitation to consider - and reconsider sensory cues that occupy the immediate and mundane.

This work was presented in the form of a video installation and a series of performance lectures at Al Riwaq Art Space. The work was shown as part of a group exhibition called ‘Post-Fiction: Manama’, which included works by Ali Hussain, Mariam Al-Noaimi, Jaffar Al-Oraibi, and Nasser Al-Zayani.