Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono

For her first museum exhibition in New York City, Lebanese American artist Nour Mobarak presents a large-scale installation reinterpreting the earliest known opera, “Dafne”, originally staged by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598 and inspired by Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne. In Mobarak’s reimagining of Dafne, 15 singing sculptures — each housing a multichannel sound installation within a mycelium structure — recount the tale in some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages.

Drawing from avant-garde sound traditions, “Dafne Phono” marks Mobarak’s most ambitious work to date, reflecting her longstanding interest in the mechanised voice and memory across her diverse practice, which spans sculpture, performance, moving image, poetry, and music. In “Dafne Phono”, Mobarak explores analogies between linguistic structures and mycelium’s biological processes, considering how both operate through repetition, decomposition, and regeneration, and how they connect to broader forces of political power. By revisiting a pivotal work in performance history, “Dafne Phono” merges natural and technological elements to investigate the voice’s capacity to endure cycles of life and death, bridging histories that are both ancient and contemporary.