Holy 204

With “Holy 204”, Egyptian sound artist Yara Mekawei presents at the daadgalerie her first solo exhibition in Germany. Employing a variety of “resonating sculptures” created with a 3D printer, she takes visitors on a journey into the mysteries of Sufism, a subject that has fascinated her for years, inspiring her research and artistic work.

Since 2014, Yara Mekawei has been working on a translation system for sounds heard in the background of Sufi texts; she uses a traditional, cryptographic method to encode and decode Arabic letters in numeric form. In “Holy 204”, Mekawei works with Sufi poems by philosophers from the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Translated into combinations of numbers, these poems serve as the basis for her sound compositions and 3D-sculptures — a translation process that not only adds another layer of meaning to the multifaceted wisdom of the past, but also brings it to life for the present.

With her translations and transformations between analogue and digital materials, text and numbers, cipher and decipherment, past and future, as well as spirituality and rationality, Yara Mekawei poses the major questions of ethics in an emotionally impactful way — issues that have gained new relevance in the present-day pandemic.