This installation derives from two ongoing bodies of work: Masticate (2019) and Words, Not Clouds Anymore, But Slow Rocks (2018–2025), in which Mays Albaik creates molds of the inside of her mouth at the very moment she attempts to speak. Inspired by Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser’s theory that words form before they are pronounced, Albaik attempts to catch words at the moment of their formation: “Before they are public, but after they become words.” With her mouth full of casting alginate, she is unable to articulate any sound; in capturing the word-in-formation, she simultaneously nullifies it. Yet the resulting mold becomes a permanent record of the movement of the mouth that signals the intended sound. Her work invites us to consider what is lost in the preservation of oral histories, and whether meaning can endure when language becomes object.

In this new commission, Albaik presents two sets of casts made specifically for the exhibition. Ten illuminated molds hang from the ceiling in the pattern of the Pleiades (Thuraya) star cluster, each capturing the position of the mouth as it forms a fragment of the Qur’anic phrase kun fa yakun (be and it is). The Pleiades, which frequently appear in Arabic poetry, including Al Mu’allaqāt (The Suspended Odes), function historically as a celestial marker of seasons and time. Below, on a pedestal, nine mirrored glass casts form the phrase ana lughati (I am my language), reflecting their surroundings as a grounded, earthly response to the celestial command overhead.

The title is drawn from a line in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem A Rhyme for the Odes , in which the poet contemplates the deep entanglement between language and being. According to Albaik: “Through the interplay of light, reflection, and breath, the work meditates on the relationship between body and language, creation and articulation, where speech becomes form and glass becomes the fragile threshold between being and saying.”