MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Can you talk about the history of the project and the materials you're dealing with?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

The idea for the project began with my interest in whistling as a method of communication between people who might not otherwise connect or share a language. In the winter of 2022, as the Woman, Life, Freedom protests were unfolding in Iran, it was a very emotional time. During a fundraising event, I invited the audience to join me in whistling a revolutionary song composed by a local collective that was popular among the protesters. This moment crystallised various elements of my work—engaging with people, focusing on process, contemplating language, and fostering unity.

After a performance at the Barbican Centre, I realised that the structural and scalable aspects of the process were becoming increasingly central to my work. My development as an artist has been significantly influenced by alternative education programs like Open School East and Syllabus, which emphasise process over outcomes and collective decision-making. These experiences, along with my academic background in contemporary art and politics from the University of Tehran and Goldsmiths, have shaped my practice.

When I received a residency at The Swiss Church, I aimed to utilise the space and resources to hold public gathering sessions. Unlike previous iterations, I sought to create an open, public community rather than focusing on specific groups. Some current alternative education programs, despite their focus on accessibility, often replicate competitive formats similar to traditional academia. More open structures, like Bidston’s Sonic and Somatic Transdisciplinary Research and Practice Program (SSTRAPP), offer better engagement models but lack financial sustainability.

My goal was to use available funding to invite different artists to co-facilitate workshops with me. As the resident artist, I wanted to mediate my position to open up opportunities and engage more people, operating like a free school open to everyone. It was also a chance for me to learn from other artists and their diverse methods, creating an experimental and inclusive learning environment. Each artist brought different methods and ways of holding space, enhancing my practice. Whistling became the central narrative connecting everything, providing a strong, multifaceted story that everyone could experiment with.

I wanted to create a loose structure where people could meet and play, allowing a sense of community to emerge organically. Reflecting on my experience with alternative education, I found that the most helpful aspect in shaping my career was meeting people, building friendships over the years, and seeding ideas through conversation. I wanted to offer a structure where people could meet peers.

I believe mentorship and learning remain vital throughout an artist's career. I consider myself a conceptual artist who crafts methodologies rather than mediums, but the project naturally leaned toward performance art. Visual and painted elements, like posters and album covers, were also crucial for documenting and representing the work. More than anything, scale was the medium essential for the political understanding of my work and how I envisioned it.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

So scale for you is a medium

it's not a material? You're working through scale, rather than with scale?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Exactly. I want to think of scale as the medium

. Art works are not similar in scale, and it's always in relation to the one who's experiencing and in relation to the space. Scale could be microscopic or universal. I was questioning how subjectivity is situated within these experiences and how something can become monumental—experienced collectively rather than individually.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Robert Morris wrote about this in his Notes On Sculpture, distinguishing between an object and a monument based on human scale. An object relates to individual experience, while a monument addresses collective experience. Are you proposing that individual subjectivity in your work transitions into collective experience?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes. The monumental experience I aim for, involves collective engagement rather than individual perception.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

So does this mark also a shift in your application of the term ‘community’?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes. This shift redefines my understanding of community, focusing on bringing together individuals who might not otherwise connect due to divisions like language, ideologies, and political positions. My work is inherently political, not in a representational sense, but in exploring how we come together.

Scaling up involves thinking about how groups can relate and unite without emphasising their divisions. Language can be a barrier. One way to think about community and how they come together is through communication, which has been systematically developed over thousands of years. I aim to connect distant elements and modes of communication, mapping correlations and finding new links between them, between people.

I liken my methodology to game design, which offers structured mechanisms for individuals to collaborate. Games don't always have to be competitive; there are many models, including collaborative ones, games without an ending, or those aimed at group formation. The models I’m interested in are collaborative, fostering group cohesion rather than individual competition.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

By using this notion of the game are you stating that something pre-exists the coming together? There is a plan, design, or parameter established in advance of the arrival of the community. It’s not just a carte blanche creation where anything can emerge. There is no set goal, but there is a sense of containment?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Absolutely, and that's my methodology. As a strategic designer, I systematically situate things, considering different ways they can be related and experienced. Like in board games, there’s a mechanism for correlating otherwise unrelated elements, and there’s always a main narrative. For my game, whistling was a narrative that contained all these different elements.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

By narrative, you mean an organising structure across time rather than the control of meaning production?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes. As an artist, you can produce subjectivity in two ways: precisely defining it or decentralising it. I prefer the latter, thinking of circulations—like orbits—that expand perpetually in different directions. When you step out of your own orbit, you see how these circles cross paths, creating moments of significance without a singular centre. This constant movement and expansion create the narrative. It is crucial, however, to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and that is where scale becomes the medium.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

So it's a reciprocal relational proposition with plurality. A centre might emerge, but it's not permanent?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Exactly. The process is always in constant movement. The lack of a singular gravitation means expansion in different directions is possible, and moments of randomly crossed paths create an illusion of centrality where the narrative emerges. Whistling embodies this concept, allowing scalable sonic experiences—from one person to millions—communicating monumental ideas through expanding sound waves.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Is this linked to the revolutionary song and your political thinking? A revolution involves continuous orbits, momentary eruptions, communication, collectivity, community, and change.

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes, I think about it as revolutionary. Revolutions create intensified group energy and communication. I wonder how to create that moment and what language we can use. Sonic experiences are important in my work, and music is a key expressive medium. While I use frameworks like social practice and performance to share a vocabulary, I don't want to limit the project to any of them. As I scale up, some elements become insignificant. My role as an artist is to see the bigger picture, similar to thinking about resolution and proximity to an image.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Can I ask about musicality and scale? Whistlers bring specific melodies, maybe folk traditions or popular cultural melodies, connected to a location, time, and history. The revolutionary song from Tehran isn’t the same as melodies from other communities. Is melody a material for you in the work?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

I approach melody in different ways. Revolutionary songs create moments of solidarity, connecting people through musical expression. Melodies transcend language, fostering connections despite different backgrounds. This universal experience of melody brings people together emotionally without always creating meaning. So yes, melody is an essential material for me.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Are you staying with a specific melody or exploring other melodies to universalize revolutionary moments?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

I want to make a universal anthem for solidarity. I aim to universalize the experience. Whistling became a language and music itself, creating shared abstract sonic experiences. I was curious about whistling languages and their cultural associations at the beginning but didn’t want to use them to produce specific meanings.

Understanding contingency helps me to understand art. I was exploring how random connection between anything and anyone I work with leads to the emergence of ideas, including melodies. Improvisation and playfulness is important for me, equally creating a structure for everything to sit together and operate holistically.

Melody in a way, is the meaning and the language I am creating.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Is this why you bring in composers as collaborators, creating constellations through emerging melodies?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes, I give agency to participants and invite artists with experience of working with people or sound. It’s also my job to harmonize everything and everyone, and manage the evolving and increasingly complex project. These collaborations help me learn from everyone involved and are essential in expanding the project's scale towards my vision of a global anthem.

I aim to reconcile individuals and institutions, build friendships, and organically develop and expand.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Is there a point in scaling up where the project becomes too big? You've designed a game and a system which operates within institutional capacities, operates within community outreaches programmes but then, I'm wondering, is there a point in scale where you cease to be able to get feedback? I’m guessing part of the game design is that there are feedback loops so you can understand what's happening, you can perceive the game, can shape the materials, but is there a point in the scaling up where you outsource to other institutions and this feedback isn’t possible? There could be multiple whistling choirs happening simultaneously in different parts of the world and you're not present or able to steer the system?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

I don’t think so. Diplomacy is part of my work when collaborating with a vast number of people and building international partnerships.

I aim to build a foundation that can carry on without me. I'm already in conversations with organisations to include the project in their international festivals, with a vision of holding a simultaneous performance across countries in June 2025. This includes stadiums, museums, and more—there is no limit. Not all artists are interested in working this way, I aim to mobilise group energy to make all whistlers part of collective memory and culture. The melody will exist beyond me and won’t be limited to an art audience.

I think of my work like the writers of epic poems; I want to create a contemporary myth and the conditions for a universal collective experience. This is how the work becomes monumental, like The Odyssey, Van Gogh's paintings or Bob Dylan's songs—universal and magical. I believe in the magical power of art.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

One of the foundational myths of performance art is that its magic is dependent on you being in one specific time and space to experience it, and you’d experience it once and then it's gone. This is part of Peggy Phelan’s ontology of live performance, in that it emerges to resist capital, to resist the market, to resist reproduction and accumulation of value. One story that gets told about performance art depends on a hyper-localised small-scale specificity whereas you seem to be speaking of an internationalism that is similar to a meme, it’s a post-internet notion where there is no one specific centralised experience. It doesn't necessarily resist capital, and it can use capital as a means of distribution, but it doesn't reward that distribution through controlling or economically valuing an experience. You’re proposing a collective trans-temporal experience as a dissemination beyond your singular subjectivity, but also even the singular subjectivity of each of the audience/participants? Then it becomes this planetary potentiality emerging from resistance songs in Tehran – a universalised moment which doesn’t require the erasure of difference?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

The ephemeral quality of an experience can be powerful and makes it harder to encapsulate into something that enters the market. It doesn't necessarily mean that it resists it. On the contrary, I don't aim to resist anything but to take advantage of everything to experiment. I just ask for something very simple: for the world to whistle together.

We started in a room, but as we grow, the planet is our stage. Sometimes I get entertained with the idea of aliens also joining us. I want this to traverse from local to global, but exist concurrently. Have you seen diagrams of the butterfly effect? Something similar.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

Again this is linked to memes or to internet culture, to the notion of circulation without reference to an origin. But there’s a certain point of distribution beyond which the project will transform beyond your recognition. Are you interested in building enough control in the game so that the structure doesn't transform completely? Can you anticipate it becoming something that you don't want it to be?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

I think it's okay if the structure develops and produces something other than itself, more like an allopoietic system. A game can be a controlled environment but also designed to take unpredictable directions and embrace the contingency of whatever comes without escaping the game. Even the interactions and communications between people who take part generate new possibilities and meaning!

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

You've just got a tattoo that says ‘no more gossip’ but it seems like you actually are interested in more gossip! Gossip is something that's part of this.

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes! With gossip you don't have control of the narrative, and gossip is less factual and more about fabulation.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

You gossip with somebody to produce intimacy. Primarily, I mean, you are transmitting information, a narrative gets transmitted, but the information or the meaning or signification is far less important than modes of intimacy or inclusivity. Gossip is more explicit than other forms of language about the fact that it's always about producing some kinds of relation.

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

And this is where the narrative is out of your control. Gossip can help with the mythmaking I have in mind.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

A Community Gossip Choir!

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes! I’d love a Community Gossip Choir. Artists underestimate how much of their career is based on gossip.

I think a lot about how the work can circulate. The work can exist as gossip, an exhibition, a Spotify playlist, a theatrical piece, a dance piece at Sadler's Wells, a flash mob at Piccadilly Circus, or whatever. It can take different forms, without being against each other. Each different way of presenting it, offers a different capacity to communicate diverse audiences.

I'm interested in how my work fluidly can take various forms and shapes. Building a narrative is like a puzzle where you manage data, build blocks, and when they start connecting, the image takes shape. That's what I'm doing—building the smaller blocks, but there will be a time when they all connect and become monumental.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

We’ve been focusing on your practice of the Choir, but your vision is not contained to or by the Choir? It seems that the main things that you're interested in, which are all there in some way in the Choir, are process, relational subjectivity and distribution, a politics of that distribution of subjectivity according to capacities and flows that pre-exist, but also how you might alter those capacities and flows. There’s something about this scaling up as an artistic practice that sounds to me choreographic. You’re exploring how to assign capacities and flows across time as enabling shifts in scale?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Exactly.

MARTIN HARGREAVES:

A research question here is something around how do institutional demographics have institutional goals and aims, how do they map out certain possibilities that you can flow through to a certain point but also flow in completely opposite directions simultaneously, to finally meet up somewhere else?

ALIASKAR ABARKAS:

Yes, they can each offer something based on their capacities and speciality. I navigate between these limitations. Institutions are often self-centred and operate internally. I think they are becoming aware of that hold and want to change it. I offer them a way to do that and they can see that.

Going opposite directions without a crash. That’s apohophenic

: finding logical correlations amongst seemingly disparate ideas, individuals and contexts. Through this approach, I nuance the relationships that at first come across as random. A perpetual exploration, weaving these connections into a narrative that adds depth, dimensions and forms.

When I say I work through scale as a medium

, it’s also timescale, it's also temporal. This is a choreographic question.

Works mentioned:

Morris, Robert (1966) “Notes on Sculpture.” Artforum, vol. 4, no. 6 (February), pp. 42-44

Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge