Urok Shirhan: GR/AND M/OTHER TONGUES

Departing from the fact that both of my grandmothers were illiterate, “GR/AND M/OTHER TONGUES” delves into an investigation of 1930s and 40s radio practices in Iraq and Palestine under British Colonial rule.

Through historical as well as speculative research informed by family stories and anecdotes, I want to take a closer look at what it means that both of my grandmothers’ relationship to language was purely sonic: oral and aural. In other words, because they were illiterate, they had no relation to the written word, emphasizing the tongue as the primary instrument of language, alongside the ear.

Oscillating between the personal/anecdotal and the grand/magnanimous; between single, un-amplified voices and the loud voices of the masses; between the orchestrated voice of state power, and the forgotten cry of resistance; and all the nuances and semitones in between.

My own relationship to language and a “motherland” is unstable, to say the least. Having been born into my parents’ exile, I have never set foot in Iraq, my so-called country of origin. My “mother tongue” or “native language” is Arabic, but I have been losing my literacy over the years growing up in the West. Can you lose your mother tongue? What kind of other tongue(s) do you get instead?

For this project the focus will be on the radio, mouth, and ears, rather than eyes. What happens to our speech when we prioritize listening over seeing? How is being sonically “tuned in” collectively while listening to the radio, together in space, in-real-life (IRL), different from listening together “live” and in-real-time (IRT)? What kinds of solidarities are possible across distance?

As part of the project, I want to develop a new body of work looking at the phenomenon of the “Mother Tongue” and “Other Tongues”.

During my residency at Onassis AIR, I developed “GR/AND M/OTHER TONGUES”, a performance-based project exploring the intersections of language, memory, migration, and sound through personal and historical narratives. Rooted in the stories of my two grandmothers, my mother, and myself, the work navigates the complexities of literacy and illiteracy, the embodied experience of language, and the ways sound and image carry histories beyond words. The residency provided a crucial space to write, draw, assemble material, and test my ideas in a supportive environment enriched by the exchange with fellow artists.

In the early stages of the residency, I presented an initial tryout of the performance during a feedback sharing session with the other Fellows and the Onassis AiR team. At that point, my presentation included slides of real photographs – portraits of me, my mother, and my grandmothers – aiming to anchor the work in specific personal and familial histories. However, during the presentation and subsequent feedback session, I noticed something significant emerging from my writing and storytelling: my focus was less on literal images or fixed narratives and much more on the hands, the lines, and the gestures – on the act of drawing itself. This led me to think about language not only as text or speech but as something that begins with the body, with movement, marks, and signs.

This insight was very much connected to the material itself. The project references my paternal grandmother’s use of symbols to mark phone book entries, my father’s letters to his mother written while in exile using drawings alongside words, and my own early attempts to write my name on a chalkboard in a completely new country. These moments reflect a language before language, an intimate and tactile engagement with marks and signs that precede conventional literacy. Drawing, in this sense, becomes not just a visual style choice but a return to what I think of as a primordial, pictorial sense of communication – the way words and meanings begin before they become words on a page. It’s about legibility rather than literacy, about recognizing gestures and forms that communicate through recognition rather than decoding.

After the initial tryout, I decided to move away from photographs and toward line drawings – simple tracings of those photographs that preserved the essence but removed the exactness of time and place. The choice to use drawings rather than images was deliberate. Old photographs often carry a nostalgic quality that can create distance; they mark a moment locked in time and space, sometimes exoticizing or historicizing their subjects. Drawings, by contrast, open up questions of truth and fiction. They exist between representation and invention, inviting the viewer to engage imaginatively and emotionally, to wonder: Is this real? Is this memory? Is this story made up? And (when) does the distinction even matter?

This tension between the personal/anecdotal, the historical, the remembered, and the imagined runs through the entire work. The residency period was filled with writing, reading, drawing, listening, making, and rehearsing – a multi-layered process of assembling fragments across time and memory. The Open Days presentation at the residency’s culmination was a vital moment, allowing me to share this evolving work publicly and receive invaluable feedback not only from the Onassis AiR team but also from fellow artists and the audience. Their reflections helped me refine the project’s language and form and deepened my understanding of how the work moves between clarity and ambiguity.

A key aspect of this project also relates to my own experiences of illiteracy. These moments are not just metaphors but lived realities: the first, when I was born into a world shaped by displacement; the second, when my family arrived as refugees in the Netherlands; and the third, when I moved to Athens. Each of these transitions involved shifts in language, alphabets, and modes of communication, exposing different facets of literacy and illiteracy – not simply the ability to read or write but the deeper experience of language as sound, gesture, and meaning-making in unfamiliar contexts. This intimate relationship to language, migration, and transformation shapes the work’s exploration of belonging and estrangement.

Sound plays a central role in this exploration. My two grandmothers came of age at a time when radio was becoming a widespread phenomenon in the Arab region (Iraq and Palestine specifically) and around the world. Radio represents a mode of communication that transcends literacy and writing, speaking directly to the ear and the body – a transmission that doesn’t depend on text or eye reading. This sensory connection to language, the oral and aural dimension, is fundamental to the work. It reflects a recognition that communication and storytelling can exist powerfully outside the written word, that sound and voice carry histories, emotions, and memory in forms that are immediate and intimate – as well as seductive and, possibly, even misleading.

The residency environment was crucial in allowing me the time and space to hold these complex threads together – to work with different media, to experiment with form and content, and to situate personal history alongside broader cultural and political concerns. The feedback sessions with the Onassis AiR team and other AiR Fellows were especially important, offering a space for dialogue and reflection. The Open Days presentation was a milestone where the work-in-progress could be experienced and responded to as a whole, giving me further insight into its potentials and future directions.

Overall, this residency has been a formative chapter in my practice, offering not just resources and time, but a community and a platform to deepen the work’s questions around language, memory, and representation. “GR/AND M/OTHER TONGUES” continues to unfold as a layered conversation between past and present, image and sound, fact and fiction – a work rooted in the body, in gesture, and in the intimate spaces where language emerges and transforms.