⚭ BIO
scroll for interviews ☇
Jessika Khazrik was born in year 7291 of her grandmother’s enduring calendar. She is an artist, composer, technologist, educatress and writer who works with a trans-millennial production of knowledge based on an environmental understanding of the techno-politics of voice, media and code. With genre-defying mercurial treatments of voice, drums and space, her work intimately investigates the ecological and techno-political premises of continua we inhabit, co-create or forget. Concocting scores from trans-millennial compendia of healing, space and biosensing technologies and on-site/online detritus, her live/hybrid sets and sound installations are deeply informed by ancestral chanting traditions – like Armenian sharakan, Levantine mawwal and Iraqi radh – skewed with a quaint techno and incomputable entrancing rhythms.
Performing and exhibiting internationally in a wide range of spaces from clubs to museums, theatres, quarries and hybrid spaces of unlearning, she festively uses spaces of congregation to search for locally entrenched universalisms that could collectively respond to the dystopias of our times. While probing the unity of science and the multi-dimensionality of experience in an age that institutes separation, her indisciplinary practice revolves around the collectivizing search and need for an active, polymathic politics of demilitarization. She holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University(LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT(US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.
She has performed her solo music at ALL(CN, 2018), Ballroom Blitz(LB,2019), CTM Festival(DE,2020), Haus der Kulturen der Welt(DE, 2018), ICA Boston(US, 2015), Les Urbaines(CH,2018),Rewire Festival(NL,2021), SONICA Festival(SI, 2021), Supersonic Festival(UK, 2022), Takseer Festival(DE, 2022) and Theater Der Welt(DE, 2014), among others. Her multi-channel sound installations have been commissioned by and exhibited at ar/ge kunst(IT,2020), Kunsthalle Wien(AT,2020) LACE(US,2017), LUMA Foundation(CH,2017), Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi(PL,2022) and Para Site(HK, 2021) among others. Her essays and short stories have been published in edited anthologies and multiple publications like Bidayat Journal(LB), E-flux(US), Zweikommasieben(CH), MadaMasr(EG), Kohl Journal(LB), The Funambulist(FR) and Ibraaz(US) to name a few. Her indisciplinary research-based work has been presented at the Stanford Research Institute(US), the Arab Image Foundation(LB), Birbeck’s School of Law at UCL(UK), Center for Documentary Arts and Research at UCSC(US) and Amnesty International(UK & DE), among others.
Khazrik has been an artist fellow at Home Workspace Programme(2012-13), Digital Earth(2018-19), HfK Bremen(2020) and SHAPE Platform(2021-22), If I Can’t Dance(2022-23) and Helmholtz Center (2022-23). As visiting faculty, she has taught voice-based electronic music, performance and techno-politics at HfK Bremen(DE, 2020), the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel(CH, 2021-24), the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg(DE, 2022-24) and guest lectured internationally. As independent technologist, she has worked on AI policy and digital rights internationally and is the initiatress of the techno-study group ‘قراءة الحواسيب READING COMPUTERS’, the peer-to-peer web platform and study;strategy;solidarity group ‘POST-CORONIALISM’, the online transclusive research platform ‘خريطة الظلام CARTOGRAPHY OF DARKNESS‘ and the open alliance AATMA ✦ عتمة. Having grown up around a quarry contaminated with toxic waste, she has been active in struggles for environmental justice since early adolescence. Raised in a club at the outskirts of Beirut, Khazrik has been performing music live from since she was 14, DJing from since she was 17 and organizing assemblies and raves since then. Both of her grandmothers practiced divination. She is of Lebanese, Armenian, Kasdanian Iraqi and Indian descent.
⌾ Conversations/Interviews
⚭ ‘Super Short-Term Ecstasy After Super Short-term Collapse: An interview with Jessika Khazrik’ @ SHAPE Platform ⚭
⚭ ‘Never Confined to One Space: How Jessika Khazrik is fixing the future through techno’@ Mixmag Magazine ⚭
⚭ ‘Music Reminds me of Universes to Come: A conversation with Jessika Khazrik on rhythm,technologyand the environment’ @ Cover feature for Ballroom Express ⚭
⚭ Conversation With Johanna Hedva @ Amplify Berlin ⚭
⚭ ‘Why Beirut Is Going through a Revolution in Electronic Sound’ @ Redbull Magazine ⚭
⚭ The Art of Collaboration: Live conversation with Gazelle Twin & NYX @ Supersonic Festival ⚭
⚭ Cashmere Radio w/ Folly Ghost ⚭
⚭ Conversation with Emmanuele Guidi on solo exhibitoon ‘Abeyance & Concurrence’ ⚭
⚭ ‘السّياحة الجنسيّة والعروض البيوميثوغرافيّة: حوارٌ مع جيسّيكا خزريك’ ⚭
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