Replica – Relic

Replica – Relic

A presentation by Dania Shihab

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

No late seating––we cannot guarantee admittance after 6pm

Without consent from the British Museum, artist Dania Shihab surreptitiously took 3D scans of several Mesopotamian artifacts—items “acquired” from her homeland of southern Iraq. These scans became the blueprints for a series of reconstructed sculptures, enhanced with interactive sensors that allow her to reanimate the sonic memories embedded within each object. Composing with an ancient musical tuning system that was documented on cuneiform tablets, she imagines a soundscape of southern Iraq unadulterated by colonial interference. In this lecture, Shihab will outline her process for researching, fabricating, and activating these objects as an alternative approach to repatriation and how her work fits into a larger set of questions around decolonization and stewardship.

Dania Shihab is a transnational artist, musician, curator and emergency doctor based in Barcelona. She holds a bachelor of medicine / bachelor of surgery degree from the University of Tasmania (2006) and holds an associateship in advanced emergency medicine from the Australia College for Emergency Medicine (2024). As a sound artist, her practice focuses on identity, borders, and displacement based on her experience as a forced migrant. Using samples and field recordings and employing her voice as a tool of cultural and gender agency, she composes long-form electroacoustic pieces. Since 2014 she has headed the Paralaxe Editions platform, where she releases experimental music and curates performances across Europe. In 2023 Paralaxe Editions became an orbiting resident at Hangar, Barcelona. She has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonic Acts, Sónar, Mira, She Makes Noise, and Cafe Oto. Shihab has published several musical works related to her experience as a migrant and her cultural identity in transition, including Voz (2022) and Foreign Body (2023). In 2024 she completed a five-week residency in Providenza, Communities Between Islands (Sardinia/Corsica and Syros), where she mapped the land–sea interface and explored its impact on the concept of borders within migrant communities. She has been selected as a 2024/25 artist of SHAPE+, a platform for innovative audiovisual art. In November 2025 she was a guest composer at the Elektronmusikstudion Stockholm.

Image: Photo: Cecilia Diaz Betz.