Editor’s note: Patrick McGuan’s visual art column will regularly appear in Central Current. McGuan taught as an adjunct instructor in studio art at Syracuse University. Zelikha Zohra Shoja took 0ne class McGuan taught in 2021.  The origins of Zelikha Zohra Shoja’s experimental film “In Search of Bluer Tongues” trace back to a film Shoja cannot shoot and a script she barely remembers. In 2021, Shoja was preparing to shoot a loosely autobiographical feature film at her maternal grandmother’s home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The United States’ and NATO’s withdrawals and return of the Taliban prevented her from traveling to the region.  Her grief in this time of chaos and upheaval was overwhelming, but with the encouragement of colleagues and mentors, Shoja began to piece together other ways of realizing the project as a way to honor her grandmother and stave off hopelessness. Her grandmother’s home had been in her family for generations, and Shoja asked the one branch still living there to take pictures of the interior and exterior that she might use for backdrops to film in other locations. The photos came back over WhatsApp. Some kept the vertical orientation of the smartphone. Others captured the photographer’s fingertips at the edge of the lens, the blur of motion in low light, or were screenshots of video recordings.  Shoja had the backdrops printed 13 feet high for the first shoot in Islamabad, Pakistan. She directed from the U.S. via WhatsApp working with a cinematographer onsite to coordinate local volunteer actors and assistants to restage simple rituals of hospitality. At the beginning of the shoot, the actors and cinematographer struggled to intuit Shoja’s loose scripting and directions. The actors arrived with their own belongings to use as props and within 20 minutes of starting, they changed their character’s names, motivations, and directions. Curious neighbors gathered off camera and shouted their own suggestions. The cinematographer organized the files for Shoja based on how closely he thought the takes followed her original instructions. After reviewing them, she decided to combine the files into one long take that captures the whole team trying to figure out what the film is about in real time.  “This kind of chaos of trying to decide who’s in charge and what to do is very Afghan, a very Afghan experience,” Shoja said.  That shoot inspired what would come over years: more shoots in Kiev, Ukraine, Syracuse and Queens. This footage eventually cohered into “In Search of Bluer Tongues.” The film will be screened at Light Work on Friday at 6:30 p.m. Shoja’s frequent collaborator Fatemeh Kazemi will conduct a creative dialogue with Shoja and some of Kazemi’s work may be shown. Kazemi, who obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree in Syracuse, is currently in Iran.  Shoja’s piece will also be screened by Urban Video Project on the north facade of the Everson Museum of Art every Thursday through Sunday from dusk until 11 p.m. through Sept. 12. Shoja created the film with support from UVP’s juried regional commission. As part of the commission, she worked with Community Care of Syracuse, Northside Learning Center, Masjid Isa ibn Maryam (Mosque of Jesus, son of Maryam) and Tempest Gallery in Queens to stage reenactments and screen tests with community members who had a relationship to displacement or diaspora.  Anneke Herre, the program director at UVP, sees a moving urgency in Shoja’s film. “It’s a response to certain forms of impossibility,” Herre said. “I think that that’s always a really interesting starting point for a work of art.” Shoja had planned to ship the backdrops from the shoot in Pakistan to different friends to shoot the same vignette in other landscapes. “This is maybe kismet. The next place I sent them was Kiev in Ukraine in 2022,” Shoja says, and the original backdrops are still in bureaucratic purgatory in Ukraine. Working with a second generation of backdrops printed at a smaller scale, Shoja shot more footage in collaboration with volunteer performers in Syracuse and Queens. Literal blue tongues make an appearance in one section of Shoja’s video where she interlaces screen tests of performers sticking out their tongues stained by blue candy. These shots were adapted from the opening of Shoja’s unrealized feature where a young girl and her grandmother mischievously show one another their tongues stained by mulberries, but “In Search of Bluer Tongues” doesn’t settle on a single layer of meaning or interpretation. Reference and connection wander through Shoja’s piece. Blue tongues are part of a game, but we also watch as language tries and fails to move across distance, between speaker and audience, and through translation and transliteration. Blue appears as the vacant signal of an unconnected monitor and later as the moving text of a karaoke video. One sequence toggles between blue subtitles that read “there was, there wasn’t,” a literal translation of “yake bood, yake nabood.” Shoja explains that this is the traditional opening for folktales in Persian literature, equivalent to the English once upon a time: “It’s immediately negating itself. There’s ambiguity. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know when you are.” Shoja’s quick cuts between images eventually create the sense of one long shot that superimposes two places but inhabits neither. Some of the partial connections between image and audio stem from performers’ refusal to appear fully on camera. In the era of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, some community members would show only their hands or ask that their voices be overdubbed. Our conversation keeps looping back to the inadequacy of language. Sometimes this is on a practical level, other times at an existential pitch. Shoja earned an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in diaspora studies and visual studies. Her early fieldwork included interviews with a TASCAM recorder, and the most insightful conversations started when she turned the recorder off. The framework of academic theory and writing felt constrictive, and written words couldn’t hold the richness of experience.  “It felt like it was trying to intellectualize the experiences in a way that felt dishonest.” Shoja says of her motivation to move into film and video, “Artmaking, you can carry multiple truths. You can embrace chaos, you don’t need to reduce things. I can see the world for the way it is with its chaos, and it’s polyphonic … The world is open, so why would I want to explain the world around me in a very controlled way?” UVP is accepting proposals for their Regional Commission now through September 21st. Applications are processed over Slideroom through this link. The post Zelikha Zohra Shoja’s ‘In Search of Bluer Tongues’ weaves Syracuse into the global strands of diaspora appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less