Qanat
Sholeh Asgary
Sholeh Asgary’s Qanat is an interactive sound and light installation named after the ancient Iranian underground water channel system. Asgary amplifies the resonant qualities of a traditional rug with the sound of water, as a pendulum microphone hung above picks up the amplified sounds of the rug, movements, and room tone, creating a live feedback loop. Visitors are invited to sit, lay or stand on the rug, affecting the transmission of sound throughout the gallery. The exhibition also includes a series of embossed prints that are topographical mappings created by Asgary’s breath and a video work that references water, transmission, and incommunicability. Qanat reminds us that we are all born into the comforting darkness of sound and water.
Location: CNSI Lobby and Art Sci Gallery, 5th Floor of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI)
570 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Parking: Parking Structure 9
675 Charles E Young Dr S, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Navigation: After parking, proceed to the top floor of the structure. Take the gangway along the north side of the lot, then navigate around the CNSI building to its east entrance on the 3rd floor. From there, you can access the lobby and the Art Sci Gallery on the 5th floor.
>>Exhibition Dates:
MAY 09 - JUN 06, 2025
Hours:
Thursday & Friday: 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Saturday: 12:00 – 3:00 PM
More info:
https://soundofatmosphere.com
Sholeh Asgary (b. Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages sound, hybrid art forms, and performance to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Asgary’s primary material and deepest conceptual concern is sound. Through site-specific installations, sound sculptures, performances, archival projects, and collective collaborations, her work challenges colonial assumptions about what is heard, proposing new futures. Asgary’s debut album, آبـان (Aban), was released in 2024 through Sming Sming Books and Crystalline Morphologies to critical acclaim. A member of UCLA’s Art|Sci Collective, her work is featured in the 2024-25 Getty Pacific Standard Time Atmosphere of Sound exhibition and has been presented by institutions such as Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, The Lab, / slash art, and Stanford University. Asgary is a 2023 Artadia Finalist and her Audio Archive Booth is short-listed for a 2025 Creative Capital grant. Her practice is featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue” and reviewed in international publications. She has received support from institutions such as Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center, Culture Hub, and ARoS Kunstmuseum, and her awards include a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a California Arts Council Grant for MAJLES, and funding from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation for her compositional work for Dance Elixir. Asgary is a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts and serves on the Southern Exposure curatorial council. She holds an MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University.