Epiphany: The Cycle of Life is a collaboration between visual artist Ali Hossaini, composer Paola Prestini, and writer Niloufar Talebi. It is a modern Requiem Mass, an "ecumenical mass for humanity," a work of video, text, and music. It draws from the Western tradition of the Latin Mass, and from Eastern traditions, including the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Zoroastrian rites. Though inspired by these traditions, Epiphany unfolds through the universal languages of poetic text and images, and music, rather than adhering to a specific perspective on life, death and rebirth. It peers bravely into death, and the universal notions of redemption, loss, grief, fear of the mystery, and awe. Epiphany expands the concept and mood of a traditional Requiem.
The work is a 4‐channel video installation accompanied by an original polyphonic score for chorus. About 50 minutes in length, it will premiere with live performers, and then presented as a video installation accompanied by a recorded loop of its choral music, the audience contained within the square in an immersive video environment.
Epiphany is conceived by Ali Hossaini, who reflected on his mother's description of her last days. The story opens as the natural powers of perception fade and the world becomes more animate, the first transformative steps towards death. Hossaini has created an undulating visual language that contains dance‐like gestures, video paintstrokes and hidden meanings that portray the disintegration of living perception.
Paola Prestini has created a modern Requiem mass that captures the depth of this very personal experience. Hossaini’s visual grammar mirrors the complex melodies and underlying rhythms of Prestini’s compositions to create a synaesthetic environment that celebrates the passages of life and death. Talebi's text is an amalgam of poetry, prayers, and death-bed soliloquies, told from multiple perspectives. Themes emerge, develop and twist across the four screens, creating a visual polyphony that entwines image, text, and music. With Epiphany, Talebi casts an intensely personal glance onto these themes.
Epiphany is the realization and celebration of the life force/soul/consciousness, its purpose, and continual transformation as the dying let go of earthly attachments, releasing into the unknown. It is a record of the thoughts rushing through the dying person's mind, the conversation with the self, with others, and with the divine/angels/afterlife. This Requiem Mass is an affirmation to LIVE LIFE TO ITS FULLEST, every pulsating moment, for death is certain, and life after death, and the notion of rebirth, a mystery laden with possibility. We all feel the ever-presentness of mortality. Life gains its value from the certainty of death. Rebirth and immortality are the reveries of the living...
Texts that inspire us: the canon of Christian prayers, the Latin Mass, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Avestan prayers for the dead, Mexican/Aztec/Nahuatl Dia de Los Muertos prayers, various world poetry, such as Rilke's Duino Elegies, and Persian poetry.
