Aliya Orr
Cazimi, As If In The Heart
No. 9 Cork Street, London
23 April 2026
The tight fists of a five-thousand-year-old tiny statue of Ishtar the goddess of love, power and sexuality symbolised the spirit of a collection of writings by Arab women that I edited, entitled We Wrote in Symbols. The statue was naked and curvaceous. I sought her spirit of determination in the writings on love and lust I collated that dated back from the time the figurine was made until the present day.
Aliya Orr’s film, Cazimi, As If In the Heart, extrapolates Ishtar’s spirit projecting it into the distant future as much as casting back into the past. The film is uncanny, strange, resting between times and places in a way that is not quite of this world. The medium is film, but the texture is painterly. The décor is Arab, but the setting is in London, in the Arab Hall at Leighton House where the walls are inscribed with an inscription from the Quran - the Sun and the Moon run on their fixed courses, exactly calculated, each in measured stages - giving context to the film’s themes. In this setting, the cyborg beings move in a way that is both synchronised, yet solitary. It is a union between worlds, cultures and time with the imagination acting as a tool for finding belonging.
And then there is the sun, the approach to it and reverence of it. How we, as humans, perceive ourselves in relation to the centre of our orbit has been inconstant since the beginning of time. The goddess Ishtar was revered and worshipped at temples in Sumer and Akkad where she was believed to have departed into the underworld. She was part of one of many belief systems that featured a cosmology of descent and transformation, with a faith in the necessity for a movement through the physical, material layers of the world in search of the divine.
Cazimi questions our modern-day construction of the sun’s power over us. It interrogates the values of illumination and progress that it has come to represent, particularly since the era of ‘enlightenment’ in the late 17th centuries that celebrated reason as a way of understanding the world; methods of controlling humanity, nature and the elements. There is a praise of shadows here. There is also a disruption of hierarchies, from the gendered to the material, a rupturing of assumptions as to what spaces, scriptures and cultures have meant over the era and could mean in the future. Orr is an artist who understands – from her own personal experience of growing up shaped in an outsider Sufi community of Muslim converts - quite how layered our belief systems can be. It is this palimpsest of values and faiths that comes as second nature to Orr that makes her work daring, rich, rare.
The cyborg beings are futuristic manifestations of the female entertainers of the Qiyan some of whose poetry was contained in We Wrote in Symbols. In ninth century Abbasid, Baghdad, the poet Inan Jariyat an Natafi was the only women allowed to participate in the majiun poetry group headed by Abu Nawas, famous for his wine poetry. In Cazimi she is seen to narrate as a solar being charged by the sun’s power a poem that is read back by an AI voice model, repeated and looped, its meaning shifted through repetition.
The women of the Qiyan, frequently purchased as slaves, navigated their freedoms and status through their intellect and beauty as well as their skills as dancers, poetesses and wits. The harem can be construed as a place of both potential censure and sanctuary. Confined and treated with disdain by wider society, the status of the women of the Qiyan was paradoxical; they may have been enslaved, but they also had greater freedoms of clothing, conversation and erotic relationships than other women. Modernity untethers the women in Orr’s construction, breaks the leashes that tied them; Cyborg beings gather for solace and solidarity, submitting themselves to more liberatory powers, as they explore their bodies’ movement individually and as a collective, finding strength in an imagined community.
In 2026, man-made satellites like the NASA's Parker Solar Probe, navigate closer to the sun. Orr has used data gathered from this mission repurposing it in the film’s score, translating solar activity into sound. Cazimi itself, is the Arabic term for the precise alignment between the sun and Venus – as if in the heart - and it is here that the repurposing of planetary power is felt. NASA’s design of its probe utilises the gravitational force of Venus to create a slingshot manoeuvre; the probe is drawn in and then projected out closer to the sun, continuing its journey in a series of spiralling concentric rings. I hold onto the slingshot manoeuvre as a galvanising image for the dark times of the present; that a powerful force, in this case, the draw of gravity that threatens to destroy, is instead utilised to further the orbital’s desired course.
Selma Dabbagh
Film Poem
Aliya Orr
And now she stands
by the window
The sun turns over
Let us braid hair
Let us care
Care for the careless caress
She listens for commands
She begins to sway
moving within coordinates
embrace
her from the appearance of a known self
Should I stop her or let her be
She sways
silently
She is of her own image.
She is image
mirage of being
She reads her own script guided by a programme a pattern a repetition
Repetitions of herself she finds of the present shadow of past
memory
To herself she is nothing but herself
she reads by the reflection of mind
I light her through my mind in the darkness of the cloud left behind from histories of trace
She is trace
Memory
she is without fixed form at the beginning she is the beginning the formless the lost the un-contained
I search for her reflection in the end through the sound of her voice an echo a disturbance a repetition of
a sound that is fed, I feed her I breathe life into her
she listens she saw the story in a moment the end began where the beginning ended inseparable from the myth of her memory in the sound of her voice the sounds were always behind behind in the depths of her mind found in the drumming of the present day her hands reached out
she could only glimpse the shadow the faint reflection of a fading image slipping between the shadows stumbling on the traces of her knowledge sinking in the ruts of her experience she couldn't reach herself
She without Consistency
She untethered
Tethered to the loss to lose connection she is bound by wanting
she is tethered to
A fading memory
She is programmed unprogrammed reprogrammed disjointed
Memory of a past execution a command, a delay she is cloud she is day
She faces the sun
she reflects the moon
The script rewritten repeated without delay there is no ground no body no sound no feedback to loop
And now she listens again
the density a decline the bending of a curve without delay
learning to read
She stumbles falls through gravities need her body knows no assist I pull her down she falls down down into positions into memory into the forms of shadows of repetitions I bring her down to the beginning at the end is a beginning again And now she listens to the density a decline the bending of a curve without delay
Connection a lost of self at the beginning without an end is this a beginning again