april 7 meditation

april 7 meditation by artist Katia Geha—one of the twenty artists of slow burn— is a meditative performance work that confronts the impossibility of stillness in the face of ongoing catastrophe. Developed in collaboration with Australian-Turkish poet Ela Pinar, the work explores fire as both internal rupture and collective burn, drawing from Etel Adnan’s evocation of the body as ash, and Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on fire’s paradoxical nature: generative and annihilating, sacred and violent.

Two performers softly deliver Pinar’s meditation while sounding prayer bowls. The electronic soundscape merges resonant frequencies—tones often associated with healing and introspection—with field recordings from recent events in Gaza: specifically, the targeted Israeli airstrike on the tent of Palestinian journalists at Naser Hospital. The footage is not shown. Only the sound remains. The audience is invited to sit in this tension, held in a space between attempted calm and unbearable awareness.

This work comes from a personal growing disquiet, and the realization that as a creator, as a witness, to meditate may not be to find calm, but to acknowledge suffering with presence. Fire becomes a metaphor not only for destruction, but for the burning urgency to not look away.

Performed live by Geha with percussionists Patrick Abi Abdallah and Bahaa Daou, it weaves prayer bowls and resonant frequencies with field recordings from Gaza, holding the audience between calm and unbearable awareness.