Sarah Kazmi, Prayers Sailing to God, 2026.
Log by log, prayer sailing to God is an altar of images, hymns and poems. Performed in three acts, it presents a visual and auditory archive in which stories and architectural fragments reflect on spaces—real and imagined—examining how migration reshapes the built environment and how memory, faith and adaptation endure across transnational contexts. The work features various media including knotted rope, old newspaper clippings, photographs (archival, found and personal), mellomleggspapir (wax paper), and avletter (wafers).
The work belongs to Kazmi's larger project Visning(s) and mirrors her earlier project Cooking, Time?, shown at the Intercultural Museum in Oslo in 2024, which explored the Pakistani labor migration to Norway. Together, the two projects flip the roles of emigrant and "foreigner" to build connection across split timelines, with the sea as passage.
Setting out from transatlantic research, Kazmi takes a critical and intimate look at the archives and traces of Norwegian emigration to North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Like the Pakistani migrants who came to Norway 100 years later, Norwegian emigrants left to seek their fortunes and a better life. They built churches, opened shops and restaurants, and gathered in their own enclaves, like Lapskaus Boulevard in Brooklyn, New York, creating subcultures that outlived the first generation of movers by decades, even centuries. All this to maintain their connection with the motherland, their native culture and language. While some were successful, the promise of the American Dream also proved disappointing to many, as it did for the inhabitants of Ørkenen Sur, a colony of unemployed and homeless Norwegian immigrants located on a landfill in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Against this backdrop, she approaches the seaport as a place of transit, a liminal, in-between space: between identities, between stories, between the life waiting to be born. The boat, as Michel Foucault writes, is "a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea."
Activating a form of nomadology connected to migration, she asks: How can we present stories that have not made history? How can we keep a nomadic approach without moving? And in what ways can we address Norwegian emigration to North America today without only looking backwards?
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17:30 Doors open
18:00 Start of the performance
18:30 Break
18:45 Discussion
Following the performance there will be a discussion between Sarah Kazmi; Norwegian-American artist and PhD fellow at the institute of Art and Media studies, NTNU, Elly Stormer Vadseth; and Aksel Øien of Propellen Teater.
Production together with Propellen Teater