A performance inspired by Attar’s Conference of the Birds, which took place in the desert landscape along the Oxus River during FIELD MEETING’s pilgrimage journey by bus on the road between Khiva and Bukhara, also known as the Silk Road in Uzbekistan.

Ghiasy presented participants with names and qualities of particular birds to contemplate as part of a set of open instructions for presence. Rather than functioning as identities, each “bird” operated as a prompt, an entry point into intuitive reflection. The work asked not for interpretation, but for direct presence and responsiveness. From this starting point, the performance unfolded as a gradual process of release. Participants moved through the landscape in shifting forms: walking, running, dancing, exercising, and stillness. Slowly, a quieter, open space emerged within body and mind, between individual and collective, where certainty softened and distinctions between seeker and sought began to blur. In this intimate space between the personal and the symbolic, the activity became internal rather than representational, unfolding as a passage rather than a story. In dialogue with Sufi cosmologies of transformation and unknowing, the work opened toward an understanding of selfhood and perception as fluid and continuously in flux, and toward the possibility of shedding what is usually held onto: names, roles, identities, fears, desires, and attachments.