Yara Mekawei is a multidisciplinary artist.

She mainly works with the materiality and immateriality of sound, exploring how sound informs and transforms visual and sculptural artistic practices. For Mekawei, sound becomes a material source and a physical embodiment of knowledge(s) that animates most of her works, while exploring how sonorousness is a transducer and point of convergence of time-space relations, as expressed and experienced in African and Arabic philosophies.

For the past seven years, Mekawei has been exploring a system of translation of sounds heard behind Sufi texts. By reading works of Sufi poets, philosophers, and scholars, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Mansur Al-Hallaj, she created a methodology that codes and decodes Arabic letters into numerals to become a score for her musical and sonic compositions. This translation process is a metamorphosis of mythology and Sufi prophets’ stories into new sonic readings of Sufi philosophies and histories.

Recently, Mekawei has published her first book in her mother tongue, Arabic. There Are Sounds of the Moving Images is a body of work resulting from years of working with, researching, and practicing within the sonic arts domain. The publication examines what she refers to as “ear vision.” Mekawei traverses conceptual questions on music and history, its interconnection to modern technologies, and digital and visual art concepts concerning the philosophy of the ear and listening practices.