There are songs sung by women across time and place, never written down, never performed in public. They hang, shimmering, inside a moment so particular yet so universal that their chords pluck at the longing inside us all, no matter who we are or where we find ourselves.

Welcome to Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّّں میں تو پاہونی. 2024, by Zeerak Ahmed. This audio/visual installation is on view at the Akron Art Museum August 10 through December 29, in the Judith Bear Isroff Gallery. Ahmed was the 2022 CAN Triennial Exhibition Prize winner; following this exhibit, Mother I Am Compelled To Leave will become part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Ahmed is a Pakistani sound artist based in the United States, creating voice-based sculptures, site-specific installations, and sound collages that explore identity, memory, and longing. Sound, as a medium, is ineffable but palpable, fragile yet powerful—excruciatingly precise in its expansive embrace. Ahmed has led MFA and PhD workshops and residencies at the Transart Institute for Creative Research; exhibited work in Sydney, Australia; Karachi, Pakistan; and Miami, Cleveland, and New York City; and was assistant curator for the 2017 Karachi Biennale, Pakistan. Her recent collaborative album, TALISMAN, includes New York-based Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily (executive producer), Grey Mcmurray (co-producer), Aaron Roche, and Greg Fox among others.

For Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave, Ahmed spent five years immersed in collecting and researching the folk music tradition of Northern India and of her family: specifically, songs sung by women in the home. This repository exists only in the oral tradition; there are no recorded archives or notated scores of these songs, which narrate the life journey of the women of Uttar Pradesh, a state in Northern India. Ahmed’s archive is the first of its kind: transcribing, translating, and annotating this particular fragile web of oral tradition.

“To score a music not meant to be written makes you wonder how much an archive can represent oral traditions,” says Ahmed. “I started thinking of memory like an object—a net—that we can add things to, carry things in, bring things forward. What do we choose to hold, what gets lost through the net, and what gets caught and held?”

Before the division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 during Partition—one of the largest and most violent migrations in history—homes had separate quarters for women, called Zenana. Inside the Zenana, women congregated for chores, celebrations, and daily activities. Ahmed’s archive traces not only the daily actions of women, but also investigates the deeper practice of rituals present in the music of those private spaces, so specific to that time and place.

“My grandmother is the only thread that connects us to the land we lived on,” says Ahmed. “This immaterial connection to our homeland through music is one of the only ways to feel connected. Music and sound are deeply spiritual practices for many of us as immigrants.”

Ahmed first came to the United States at seventeen, attending Hiram College as a studio art major minoring in political science. Hiram was a radical departure from her desert hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with its population of twenty million; Hiram had more trees than people. Ahmed was indelibly struck by the auditory differences, too: American homes are made of drywall, whose resonance is different from the hollow bricks of Karachi. And then the quietness of an Ohio winter led her to write music. She recorded her room acoustics, the wind in the trees, and birds: looping and layering sound collages that were also influenced by lo-fi production experiments on GarageBand and her formal training in classical Northern Indian music. When Ahmed returned to Pakistan, she told her parents that she never wanted to paint again. “I discovered an immediacy between emotion and medium with sound. Sonically, it felt truer.”

Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّّں میں تو پاہونی. 2024 is an interactive, multichannel installation featuring a roughly twenty-minute audio/video loop comprised of six folk songs composed as vocal scores sung in Purbi, a language spoken in Uttar Pradesh. There are three distinct audio/video channels in three different locations; the listening experience changes depending on where one moves or stands. Images of Ahmed, her mother, and her grandmother accompany the vocals. Visitors are encouraged to walk through the somatically immersive environment and to participate: a microphone stands at one end of the gallery, inviting people to sing or call as they are moved. “Whatever they wish to channel or speak through,” says Ahmed. “This is something to share together, a collective remembrance with exposure to as many people as possible.”

The six songs trace the traditional journey of a woman’s life: the birth of a female child, games and play with other girls, suitors and the marriage proposal, the inevitable farewell—leaving the childhood home for the married home—which shifts into longing for home from her new home, and yearning for a greater, spiritual connection to a sense of home.

“When people congregate and dedicate time to listen deeply, songs often become prayer: channeling, attuning, calling for something and to something,” says Ahmed. “This cycle explores themes of temporality, looping to begin again. If you walk into the space during track two or three, that might color your experience of them.”

Akron Art Museum stretched their technical capabilities to mount this installation, configuring current and new equipment to allow effective synchronization of the three audio/video interfaces. A booklet with song translations and essays from Ahmed; Nida Ghouse, scholar, curator, and co-artistic director of the Dystopia Sound Art Biennial Berlin-India 2024-25; and Jeff Katzin, senior curator at the museum, offers a takeaway for visitors to engage more deeply with Mother, I Am Compelled To Leave / اماّّں میں تو پاہونی. 2024. In order to support Ahmed’s ambitious approach to the project, the museum funded it as a commission. As a result, the artist was able to pursue additional travel and collaborations in video and audio production, and the completed work will enter the museum’s permanent collection.

“This work is about the reconstruction of disrupted culture,” says Katzin. “A lot is specific to Zeerak, her family, their region, their culture—but it is also broadly human in its themes of understanding oneself, one’s ancestry, and where one comes from. Displacement and migration are happening in many places; music is an integral part of understanding a sense of the deeper history.”

For Ahmed, there is something about the ancient chords and arrangements that transcend the barrier of language; the fact that these are women’s songs now sung in public is liberating. “Sound installations are a way of being present in public spaces. There is no body but the voice is present. Vibrations shake the floor in the room; that force, that power brings an embodied experience. Chords can embody the intention of words, drenching the melody to unlock something in our emotive, expressive bodies.”

The Akron Art Museum is located at 1 South High Street, Akron, Ohio, 44308. Open 11 am to 5 pm Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday;11 am to 9 pm Thursday. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission: Adult – $12, Senior 65+ – $10, Student with ID – $8, Adult with EBT card (up to 4 people) – $3. Free for children under 17; University of Akron students, faculty, staff with Zip Card; active-duty military and their families; and members of the museum.