A Wish is a Form of Travel is the second installment in Sophia Al-Maria’s ongoing project with the Serpentine, Taraxos, which uses the dandelion as a vehicle with which to explore cycles of history, hierarchies of kinship and what the word ‘nature’ even means via the routes of conversation, correspondence, deep listening and the principles of meditation imagery.
On the Winter Solstice, Sophia Al-Maria, Kelsey Lu and Tosh Basco presented tarax’sup? a meditative audio exercise for grounding from bud to blossom to seed to root.
For part two of Taraxos, on the Spring Equinox, we move in reverse and take flight. In Taraxos: A Wish is a Form of Travel, Al-Maria chats with artist Leila Dear about the mathematics of flowers, the healing power of geometry and float through the new series of drawings Dear produced for the project based on the structure of a dandelion blowball.
Part three of Taraxos, a physical portal, will flower on the Summer Solstice.
Visit tarax.live to read and experience.
In dedication to the unfinished unifinishable work of we.
we been seeded by the stars.
3-2-1 x infinity
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist who lives in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, film and screenwriting for TV, it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and collaboration remains a fundamental principle of her expansive practice. Sophia was the co-curator of the Serpentine Miracle Marathon in 2016, participated in the 2014 Extinction and 2015 Transformation Marathons and her films have been screened widely at Serpentine Cinemas and symposia, most recently as part of the General Ecology programme.
Leila Dear is a British-Iranian artist and educator based in London. Leila’s practice originates from her position as a subject to truth. Often working in the first place with geometric techniques – straight line and compass constructions, or with elemental phenomena such as pure vibration – she explores the commonalities between art and science. Grounded in a research practice that reads scripture alongside science fiction, feminist histories, symbology and design science, her work seeks to cultivate an embodied understanding of pattern, kinship and self-transcendence.
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