Saba N. Maheen

I am a multimodal maker, thinker, and educator working with image, reproduction, & participation. Artifacts may take form through designed experiences, queer data visualizations, and publication about alternate futures. See select projects

INTERCESSION
Starlings : Leaflets
On the QR
Kuffiyeh/Shemagh
SUMUD
Dreams for Liberation
Poppy Seeds
UNFOLDING
Responding to a Genocide
Iterativity in Processing

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P001 → INTERCESSION: Permutations on Hereness and Thereness

INTERCESSION works to access the digital account of Palestine and its current ethnic cleansing executed by the Israeli occupation, funded largely by the United States government. The interchange between developing terrors, how the world is responding to the genocide through the digital interface, and the architecture of violence become an implicating forensis.

The title, Intercession, is a reference to an act of prayer, a plea to a supreme being on behalf of another. To be an intercessor is to demonstrate care and commitment to another human being, even to the extent of sharing the weight of their plight. In a world that is constantly pulled by the currents of history and happenings, we are tasked not only to bear witness, but to intercede.

Accumulation (above) confronts the pervasive impact of imperial violence, using mounds of debris and concrete detritus to evoke the destruction in Gaza and occupied Palestine, while linking it to structural violence in the complicit West. The installation features screens displaying live-streamed imagery from the ongoing genocide (below), critiquing media bias and algorithmic manipulation, demonstrating how the addicting social media interface not only desensitizes its users to extreme violence, but additionally amplifies political echo chambers.

Palestinians are forced to wrangle the algorithm in their favor, using strategic tactics to avoid censorship and advertise their crisis for digital attention in order to raise funds for evacuation and life saving humanitarian aid. We are faced with an absurd, yet unsettling question:

How many views, likes, and comments are worth a Palestinian life?

Concrete replicas of the Gold Apollo AR-924 pager (below), tied to the covert Israeli attack in Lebanon in September 2024, further underscore the entanglement of technology, state violence, and surveillance. Moments of silence during Islamic prayer times during the span of the exhibition offer a poignant silence, revering the adhaan which was outlawed in Israel.

To Feel (below) aims to strike a humanizing connection to the victims, to consider how we can stoke the fire of empathy within ourselves beyond the screen. Nestled within the rubble exists a small hole, beckoning a viewer to place a finger inside. Suddenly, the rocking chair in the next gallery begins to vibrate in a dull beat, capturing the pulse of those who stick their finger in the rubble, allowing one to feel the heartbeat of another, even when not present. Not often are gallery visitors encouraged to touch an artwork, but here a pair within the artist’s audience may find eachother by doing just that. May we never find it necessary to reach into the rubble to find our loved ones, and ease the pain of those who must.

Entering Gallery H, the space becomes more intimate, enveloped in scarlet. Across from the rocking chair, Noise/Signal (below) is inspired by Zbigniew Ribczynski’s short film, Tango (1980); a CRTV’s high-pitched hum shows white, pixelated figures in space. A severe dehumanization occurs here; the video shows the discombobulated bodies of the other space walking amongst the rubble, creating a live, looping, ephemeral video. Akin to thermal maps and AI systems used by the Israeli army to find presence of life in Gaza, this footage functions as a record of the other room, and alludes to the surveillance technology aiding military hyperpresence.

The floor is black with white lines of a map. The blueprint reflects an amalgamation of borderlands, subverting scales of a nation and the domestic: historic Gaza city center of 1950, the IOF-controlled Iron Wall around Gaza, Philadelphi and Netzarim Corridors, the HELIX building, Civic Square Building, Raritan River in New Brunswick, NJ, and the New York L-train subway line. There are poppy seeds strewn in various areas of the map; a national symbol for bloodshed and Palestinian resilience, the seeds represent lives lost in each location to imperialist aspirations. While discussing the Israeli government’s mechanisms of border control, Heba Gowayed asks us to

consider borders “not as legal markers of sovereign territory but as a coalition of costs.”

Do borders really exist? Or are they just propagandized through inciting bureaucracy, ownership, and violence?

The space between here and there are flattened through the use of the colonial invention of mapping, yet upended figuratively as if the Earth converged tectonic plates.

Full exhibition essay co-written by Oisahkose Aghomo can be found here. Many thanks to the countless number of folks who helped make this happen. Concepted under the guidance of thesis advisor Atif Akin.