Jessika Jamal Khazrik

Astrophysical, hyperbodily and alchemical, Jessika Jamal Khazrik’s live musical practice is deeply devoted to communal solace, collective transcendence and trans-generational healing. With genre-defying mercurial treatments of voice, drums and space, her sonic scapes intimately investigate the ecological and techno-political premises of continua we inhabit, co-create or forget. Concocting scores from trans-millennial compendia of healing, space and biosensing technologies and on-site/online detritus, her live and hybrid sets are deeply informed by ancestral chanting traditions – like Armenian sharakan, Levantine mawwal and Iraqi radh – skewed with a quaint techno and incomputable entrancing rhythms.

Performing internationally in a wide range of spaces from clubs to museums, theatres and quarries, she festively uses spaces of congregation to search for locally entrenched universalisms that could collectively respond to the dystopias of our times. Her indisciplinary practice as artist, technologist, educatress and DJ also ranges from composition to collaboration, machine learning, visual art, ecotoxicology and history of science and music. In parallel to performing live, teaching speech synthesis and voice-based electronic music production, and producing multi-channel sound installations, Khazrik also composes scores for film, video games and performances and writes about science, cosmology and music. She holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University(LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT(US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.

She has performed her solo music at ALL(CN, 2018), Ballroom Blitz(LB,2019), CTM Festival(DE,2020), Haus der Kulturen der Welt(DE, 2018), ICA Boston(US, 2015), Les Urbaines(CH,2018),Rewire Festival(NL,2021), SONICA Festival(SI, 2021), Supersonic Festival(UK, 2022), Takseer Festival(DE, 2022) and Theater Der Welt(DE, 2014), among others. Her multi-channel sound installations have been commissioned by and exhibited at ar/ge kunst(IT,2020), Kunsthalle Wien(AT,2020) LACE(US,2017), LUMA Foundation(CH,2017), Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi(PL,2022) and Para Site(HK, 2021) among others. Her essays and short stories have been published in edited anthologies and multiple publications like Bidayat Journal(LB), Zweikommasieben(CH), MadaMasr(EG), Kohl Journal(LB), The Funambulist(FR) and Ibraaz(US) to name a few. Her indisciplinary research-based work has been presented at the Stanford Research Institute(US), the Arab Image Foundation(LB), Birbeck’s School of Law at UCL(UK), Center for Documentary Arts and Research at UCSC(US) and Amnesty International(UK & DE), among others.

Khazrik has been an artist fellow at Home Workspace Programme(2012-13), Digital Earth(2018-19), HfK Bremen(2020) and SHAPE Platform(2021-22) and is at present a fellow at If I Can’t Dance(2022-23) and Helmholtz Center (2022-23). As visiting faculty, she has taught voice-based electronic music, performance and techno-politics at HfK Bremen(DE, 2020), the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel(CH, 2021-22), the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg(DE, 2022-23) and guest lectured internationally. As independent technologist, she has worked on AI policy and digital rights internationally and is the founder of the techno-study group ‘READING COMPUTERS’, the peer-to-peer web platform and study;strategy;solidarity group ‘POST-CORONIALISM’ and the online transclusive research platform ‘Society.Systems'. Having grown up around a quarry contaminated with toxic waste, she has been active in struggles for environmental justice since early adolescence.