Minoosh Zomorodinia and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto performing Side by Side, City Hall, San Francisco, documentation by Chris Ruby, 2014.
Minoosh Zomorodinia and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto performing Side by Side, San Francisco Art Institute, documentation by Ana Maria Montenegro, 2014.
Minoosh Zomorodinia and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto performing Side by Side, Powell and Market street, documentation by Ana Maria Montenegro, 2016, commissioned by Jess Curtis Gravity.
Minoosh Zomorodinia and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto performing Side by Side, Union Square, documentation by Ana Maria Montenegro, 2016, commissioned by Jess Curtis Gravity.
Minoosh Zomorodinia and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto performing Side by Side, Castro and Market streets, 2016, commissioned by 100 Days Action.
Side by Side was performance conceived in 2014 in collaboration with Minoosh Zomorodinia, whereby two Muslims, a man and a woman, pray together, Side by Side in public spaces in the United States, sometimes inviting others to join us. The performance took place in 6 locations: City Hall, Harvey Milk Plaza, the San Francisco Art Institute, Washington Square Park (documentation missing), Union square and the intersection of Powell and Market street. The act serves as a protest, to be unapologetically Muslim in the West has become a politically radical gesture, proclaiming that we exist proudly in public.
‘The piece is not only meant to confront Islamophobia. It’s also meant to challenge Islamic tradition which requires women to pray behind men, and doesn’t allow them to lead prayer. Although Zomorodinia said that she prefers not to make political statements, when she prays next to Bhutto, she’s the one leading -- a radical assertion of gender equality.
“In many ways, it’s important for us to pray side by side and it’s important for people to join us,” says Bhutto, “because, in my belief, if we keep on separating on the basis of, ‘man and woman are separate, Muslim and non-Muslim are separate, queer and straight are separate,’ then our struggle is never truly unified."
“We know that our experiences of the world are very different," he says, "but in a moment like this, it’s equally important to see our common ground.”’
An excerpt from ‘A ‘Prayformance’ Confronts Islamophobia, Claims Common Ground’ by Sarah Burke, KQED February 2017.
‘In many cities, public prayer is an intensely political act, and in some areas where Muslims face day-to-day hostility from neighbors, it can be viewed as a gesture of defiance, even a threat. There is something undeniably powerful, and performative, about a religious ritual engaging a mass of people in the middle of the public square, particularly in an atmosphere of oppression or struggle. Mosques and churches--or the fraught intersections of the two--are often contested, sometimes militarized spaces. There have been efforts to, for example, bar the most basic forms of Islamic religious expression in public, such as the muezzin or minarets (the sound and sight of a Muslim presence, essentially) in some strictly “secular” (sometimes code for deeply anti-Muslim) societies.
But a rite of prayer in the open, even placed in a political context, does not have to be read as combative. It can be an act of peacemaking, a demonstration of harmony, or an active communion between the internal and external. The emotional and the civic, an interface between the space inside and outside of the social corpus. And in a space often crowded with noise, there’s something profoundly radical about the serenity of a single prayer. And at its core, creating space is what a public prayer is about. Casting yourself to fate and pouring your body and soul into whatever you identify as faith. In politics or spirituality, faith is always something worth holding space for. It’s what makes strangers welcome.’
An excerpt from ‘All in Peace’ by Michelle Chen, Culture Strike 2017