Installation

Suspended Delirium

Monira Al Qadiri & Raed Yassin
2021
Robotic performance
Dimensions variable

The work “Suspended Delirium”, created through a collaboration between Monira Al Qadiri and Raed Yassin, breaks through the formal boundaries between performance, installation, and robotics, leaving space for the bizarre.

White model constructions of mountains in different sizes on a patterned carpet. Above the mountains the robot heads of a woman, a man and a cat are hanging.

Monira Al Qadiri and Raed Yassin: Suspended Delirium. The Sun Machine Is Coming Down

© Berliner Festspiele / Eike Walkenhorst

  • 30 min

Three floating robot heads hanging from the ceiling bring the likenesses of the artist Monira Al Qadiri, the musician and artist Raed Yassin as well as the head of their cat into the ICC. With the help of voices created by artificial intelligence, the rotating heads speak of absurd things that defy human logic. There, conversations about dreams, conspiracies, experiences, and thoughts that the artists have had during their time of confinement and, in the ICC, a place of stasis, receive a new interpretation. Accompanied by sounds and a mountain backdrop resting on the floor, themes such as migration, isolation, and destruction come into focus alongside questions about life in an everyday existence that is dictated by a pandemic. How can the feeling of madness that is created by the complete uprooting of one’s own past and home be overcome?

“Suspended Delirium” was created as part of the programme for “Wild Times, Planetary Motions” on the occasion of the 70th of the Berliner Festspiele, which was curated by Natasha Ginwala and Jeroen Versteele and which had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.