Grief Meditations: Thoughts and Prayers from the Glowing Rectangle

Bahareh Khoshooee. Grief Meditations: Thoughts and Prayers from the Glowing Rectangle. 2024. Workshops, 3D-printed sculptures, animation, installation.

Part of Khoshooee’s larger Thoughts and Prayers from the Glowing Rectangle which encompasses multi-channel projection, virtual reality, and 3D-printed objects, the artist holds grief meditation sessions that take participants through a range of internal and external visualization practices. The series as a whole focuses on how grief flows between digital devices and the body, and where it tends to lodge itself. Working with students at Drew University, Khoshooee asked them each to retrieve a personal object that holds and/or signifies an experience of grief in their lives. Khoshooee then led a photogrammetry workshop that resulted in hollowed-out digital models of these objects, allowing participants to reconfigure their scale, density, and emotional import. While this workshop centered on reinterpreting the material world of grief, Khoshooee’s meditation sessions, assisted by student alice holway, focused on culling a mental model of grief from the recesses of the mind. Asking attendees to first imagine holding this object in their hand(s), Khoshooee subsequently leads them through a series of cognitive exercises that place the envisioned object at different proximities from their virtual body. Not only do these exercises create qualitative data for deeply lodged experiences of grief, they allow for its collective transmutation through attendant visualization, meditation, and vocal toning practices.