100 Lullabies Publication
2021 | 2018 | cradle songs, hand-cranked music box, laser cut paper
Sounds Like Home, SOMArts, San Francisco, CA
Minneapolis Center for Book Arts, MN
Nooshin Hakim’s One Hundred Lullabies frames cradle songs as a form of mutual aid. Initiated in 2015 in response to ongoing terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East and Europe, the crowd-sourced project collects lullabies—installed as music box script hung on a stark black wall—from children and adults who have faced conflict’s collateral barbarity. Each collected lullaby was given to only one child who was displaced by war, creating an intimate, one-to-one exchange akin to writing a letter or sending a care package.
Originally presented in galleries and museums, the online iteration of Hakim’s project does double duty as a community art project and experiential archive, and demonstrates how virtual platforms may be used to aggregate and transmit generational knowledge. In a striking visual note, the scripts, gently fluttering against the black background, resemble a deconstructed ISIS flag, its menacing threat metaphorically neutralized. To the right of Hakim’s installation, Iris Ergül’s Old She-Hyena (2015) takes up some of the dualistic social constructions—body/soul, male/female, nature/culture—that weave through and render lullabies so potent. Considered together, Hakim and Ergül’s projects portray lullabies as virtual and material cultural forms. By Roula Seikaly