SCOPE Miami 2011 presents U+262A (Crescent and Star), an opening-night performance by the artist CHOKRA (Conscious Hoarding Of Kinetic Rage Associated).

U+262A (Crescent and Star) is a performance by the artist CHOKRA (Conscious Hoarding Of Kinetic Rage Associated) that implements a unicode command to activate a somatic operative of performance. It encapsulates in a “Crescent and Star” meta-narrative the historical code, existential stance, socio-political condition, national construct and overlapping cultural histories of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates. With the actuality of migrant labour accelerating residence narratives beyond “East/West” guest-ideologies, U+262A consciously situates in a poetic consequence the collapse of polarized trajectories for a transfiguring command of majhdoor muhajreen - the exalted divinities of desert paradise.

U+262A features an electronic composition in digital and analogue sound, live utterances synthesized with labour camp field recordings from the Emirates and the algorithmic filtered remnants of “world music exotica.” U+262A also features multi-lingual rap rhyme verses conducted in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Pashto, Nepali and English; an intensified build of the multi-sensory with theatrical transnational costume; a sensorial propagation of engulfing scent, flares, timely pyromania; and an overwhelming diffusion of brilliant pigments, ground spices, crushed gold, sonapur sand, powdered cement and bright red chillies.