Dawn by Adam Seid Tahir, which premiered at MDT Stockholm and was presented at Sophiensæle from 23–25 May in the festival Making Life in the Ruins, creates inspiration, reviving ancient runic symbols.
We’re hovering in the dark, misty abyss, the world that opens when we close our eyes. We sit or stand somewhere, the centre left free by convention as we face its void from the edges. Three metallic ramps are discrete islands, shiny peaks in the hazy terrain. A Milky Way. Adam Seid Tahir is crouched on one, clad in swathes of black, lots of leather. On the balls of their feet are cloven horse hoof cosplay stilts. They hold an electric drill and, with absorbed focus, engrave the ramp’s surface with short buzzes—irregular durations of sound that don’t hint at the shape of the inscriptions. Over time, the buzzing has the effect of white noise, lulling me deeper into the dreamy embrace of the night sky in which we’re gathered, the reflective light of the platforms like starlight.
Tahir turns to address another area of the slant with the tool, and the group of visitors I’m sitting with is presented with their bare butt, exposed by gaps in the fabric pieces, before clouds of billowing smoke puff from beneath the platform, enveloping us in aerosol atmosphere and fogging our vision.
A soundscape of long drones and mystical tones emerges and entrances me, sound particles gently stroking the tight junctions of my nervous system. Energy releases, spreads, and disperses with the plumes of vapour.
Tahir descends the ramp and performs long, lunging crawls towards a corner of the space, their feline figure parting audience clusters as it approaches. The sound of galloping horse hooves builds and subsides, and I sense the powerful, smooth, low, launching motion as that of a hybrid body, a mermaid stallion who carves across and through the horizon in large figure eights, weaving through liquid land.
The quality of attention in Tahir’s activity transforms my experience of time. We are suspended in endless looping, where repetition dissolves: beginnings and endings evaporate into the continuity of elemental patterning. They find zones to pause their locomotion, fingers drawing rapid intricacies, their body following changing directions. The lunging travelling resumes, with Tahir pushing a flood light across the floor, illuminating audiences and the reflective scenography as they’re hit with the headlights.
At one point, they steady the light to shoot a beam upward and undulate in and out of its passage, the figure eights they traced across the floor now sequencing through their spine on the vertical plane. They fold over the edge of a ramp and dribble liquid. The clouds have broken, light rain falls, and dawn approaches.
Dawn is a sensuous, delicately crafted figuring of ephemeral cycles, performed with deep commitment that guides its witnesses toward the sheer magic of existence. Like being awake at night to meet the sun’s return, this performance is a soft, devoted prayer to cycles of time, space and light, allowing me to meditate in life’s orbits.
After applause, I walk over to the ramp that Tahir was drilling onto. Twilight enby twilight baby; gods; Why so binary?; Afro-viking new identity; skinfaxi and two circles forming a Venn diagram with horses galloping across the lines are inscribed: floating, imaginative bands of meaning and matter embedded in forever moving constellations of relation.
