HU /هُو Dance as if No One Were Watching You
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HU /هُو Dance as if No One Were Watching You is an installation conceived specifically for the Museo Reina Sofía by filmmaker Oliver Laxe (1982), which is being presented at Tabakalera in a new spatial arrangement.
This project is linked to the creative process of the film Sirāt (Jury Grand Prix, Cannes 2025). While the Islamic term sirāt designates the bridge that crosses over hell toward paradise, in Arabic HU /هُو refers to the primordial sonic manifestation of the deity. The subtitle of the piece comes from a verse by Rūmī (1207–1273), the Persian mystic and scholar whose work explored transcendence and the dissolution of the self into the divine through music, dance, poetry and prayer. In HU /هُو we enter a territory where the search for transcendence is grounded in the immanence of the dancing, remembering body and in the appearance of the sacred within natural, architectural and sonic landscapes.
The installation consists of a pyramid of loudspeakers drawn from the rave milieu rises in the space, emitting a sustained vibration devoid of melodic variation, alongsidethree projections depicting desert landscapes governed by an implacable sun, inhabited by temples and loudspeakers among which human figures dance. Filmed a decade ago in Iran, these architectures were built according to sacred patterns and proportions intended to make perceptible the threshold between the material world and the subtle one. The sound work by Kangding Ray approaches, through the structural materiality of sound itself, its mystery and its inherent immateriality.
Through fades and superimpositions, HU /هُو constructs a visual grammar that accentuates the spectral condition of the image and evokes a physical, sensory and synaesthetic experience that seeks to reenchant the world.