“I try to create a space in which I can dress like Kim Kardashian and she can dress like me.” Zhala is a conceptual musician, artist and performer of Kurdish descent, born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. She is one of the founding members of the LGBT club Donna Scam in Stockholm, and the first and so far the only artist signing to Robyn’s Konichiwa Records.

Zhala’s music consists of haunting rhythms and evocative melodies accompanied by meditative lyrics. Her music can be described as futuristic and slightly eerie, or, using the artist’s own words as “religious rave” or “cosmic pop”. Among her influences she lists Spice Girls and Nirvana.

This year’s 8th Momentum Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art has invited Zhala to create a biennial soundtrack. Curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist (SE), Birta Gudjonsdottir (IS), Stefanie Hessler (DE/SE) and Toke Lykkeberg (DK), the exhibition considers “tunnel vision” as a cultural and artistic condition. Today’s networked culture not only generates hyper-connectivity, but also various disconnects. People and communities can thrive in bubbles of their own. Momentum 8 focuses on artists who inhabit worlds of their own logic and follow their thoughts all the way through. It looks at so-called “filter bubbles” and “you-loops” sparked by the personalisation of the Internet through the abundant use of cookies and matching metadata algorithms, and how at present new chemicals and drugs are used as chemical equivalent to these technologies to create a tunnel vision that narrows down this
spectrum of information and our access to it.

Fragments of Zhala’s music seep through and permeate the entire biennial and its different venues and events, creating a club-like atmosphere and recurring moments of déjà-vu. Sound leaks out from the factory building, which is one of the two sites of Momentum 8, as if it were caused by the distorted volume of a nightclub, and from the fireplaces in the old mansion, which is the biennial’s second venue.

Zhala’s voice accompanies the at times distant and at times euphoric rhythms and melodies, with statements like “I try to create a space in which I can dress like Kim Kardashian and she can dress like me. I see us as equals.” During the opening of Momentum 8, Zhala performed live with her collaborator Tony Karlson, who directed her video “Holy Bubbles”, in an ecstatic, glittery and sensual performance, saturated by the smell of rosewater.

Momentum – Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway.