Katia Kameli: The Canticle of the Birds

Why it is worth going

Kameli reworks Farid ud-Din Attar's poem, in which a hoopoe leads the birds through seven valleys in search of the Simorgh, and the show gathers the hoopoe, falcons, mynas, owls, herons, vultures and the Simorgh itself as playable ceramic sculptures and watercolours set in clay frames.¹ The sculptures are bird-shaped ocarinas made with the ceramicist Marie Picard, modelled on Minoan vessels Kameli saw at the Heraklion Museum.¹ Her 2022 film of the same name, commissioned by the Institut des cultures d'Islam, follows performers playing them through the Goutte-d'Or in Paris, and it is shown here with the 16-metre ink-on-silk Seven Valleys.¹ The exhibition text is by Lucas Morin, curator at the Jameel Arts Centre.¹ Kameli, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1973, is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the CNAP and MACBA, and has shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Mucem and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.²