Contributors:
Environment Society of Oman, Suaad Al Harthi, Olivia Dalziel, Andy Wilson, Robert Baldwin, Gianna Minton, Darryl MacDonald, Tim Collins, Aida Al Jaberi, Elayne Looker, Sal Cerchio, Ernie Indradat, Wided Khadraoui, Maia Willson, Nour Alrefaie, Bridget St. John.
Between Desert Seas (2021) is a multilayered sonic installation that renegotiates our relationship with the seas surrounding the Arabian Peninsula. An immersive sonic experience of different elements gathered and made through the research process. Between factual and fictional, these elements have been weaved together to create a tapestry of stories highlighting the Arabian Sea Humpback whale. A nonmigratory unique population of their kind that has been isolated for about seventy thousand years. In their solitude, they developed their own language, their own song, their own culture. Between historical whaling and recent anthropogenic activities, less than one hundred of them survived today.
“He gazed out into the infinite ocean, and wished he could understand all of the fish singing praises,” begins the installation’s narration: a reference to the story of the prophet Yunus (Jonah), who was swallowed by a whale. Through a voiceover, the installation establishes parallels between Yunus’s journey and the routes of Arabian Sea Humpback whales. The work’s sculptural component, meanwhile, hinges on the materiality of white salt. In the context of this work, salt serves as an allusion to hypersalinity—a pressing ecological issue—and is shaped into “grief objects” reminiscent of tombstones found at sites all over the peninsula. Merging spiritual and environmental concerns, Zedani’s work reflects on environmental collapse, matrilineal transmission of culture, and the impact of desalination technologies on marine ecosystems. In doing so, these whales become symbols of endurance and inheritance—at once singular and universal.
