shemza.digital roots #1, 2026
Aphra Shemza & Jamie Howard in collaboration with ArtForum Youth Group from Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Sound piece remixed by Shireen Qureshi, based on an original score by NYX (Shireen Qureshi & Sian O’Gorman) and Petit Oiseau (Suren Seneviratne & Jatinder Singh Durhailay)
Voiceover: Aphra Shemza - meditation co-created with Angie Tiwari and ArtForum Youth Group.
Materials: Audio-visual meditation, 1080p HD video, Ipad and headphones
Duration: 10mins 53secs
shemza.digital roots #1 is a contemplative audiovisual meditation developed in dialogue with Anwar Jalal Shemza's Roots series. Emerging from Aphra Shemza's own transcendental experience following an intensive breathwork journey, the work was further shaped through collaborative workshops with young people from the ArtForum Youth Group at Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
Designed as a ten-minute immersive meditation experience, the piece invites audiences into a heightened state of self-awareness and interconnectedness with one another and the natural world. Its visual language draws on Arabic calligraphy research undertaken with Razwan Ul-Haq and Daniel Lowe at the British Library, abstracting forms from a fourteenth-century Iraqi manuscript on plants, specifically a passage dedicated to wild cumin. The soundscape combines traditional South Asian instrumentation by Petit Oiseau with the electronic and vocal textures of NYX, bringing together ancestral and contemporary sonic traditions.
Created in response to an increasingly fragmented and polarised world, shemza.digital roots #1 offers a shared space for reflection, connection and collective presence. Echoing the meditation's central refrain—"in the personal is the universal, in the one is the all"—the work proposes interconnectedness not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived, embodied experience expressed through sound, breath and moving image.