Joe Namy is an American-born, London-and Beirut-based artist, educator, and composer who often works collaborati­vely across media—in sound, performan­ce, sculpture, and video. Their projects focus on social constructs of music and organized sound, like the pageantry and politics of opera, gender dynamics of bass, colors and tones of militarization, migration patterns of instruments, and the complexities of translation in all this—from language to language, from score to sound, from drum to dance.

Namy’s work The Curtain of the Sky is a visual and sonic composition. A collective offering from the city’s communities, in the form of donated or worn fabrics and textiles, was used to create a large blue monochro­matic curtain situated on a pedestrian bridge along the Viskan River. The work tunes in to the city’s history of labor, migration, and textiles, while revealing the social fabric of the city today.

A short while after the inauguration of the Biennial the piece was vandalized and destroyed. Borås Art Museum decided to produce a new piece, as a symbolic gesture. A new edition of the original work can soon be seen on site, where the artist recreated a blurred version of the original design. The curtain was printed and sewn by the digital print company Tobex.

Namy graduated with an M.F.A. from New York Uni­versity. In 2011 they took part in the inaugural. Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace ISP in Beirut and now serves on the curricular committee and as an artist mentor. Recent exhibitions, screenings, and performances in­clude: Le18 Rooftop Disguised as Dance Floor, 1-54 Forum, Marrakech Morocco, (2020); Half Blue, Ber­linale Forum Expanded, Berlin, Germany (2020) and Minneapolis Museum of American Art, USA (2019); Libretto-o-o d’artifice, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK (2020); Automobile Redux, V&A Museum, London, UK (2019); ‘32: The Rescore, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2019); The Eighth Auto­mobile, Art Night London, UK (2019); and Automobile, Durub Al Tawaya, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2019).