Arts in Movement: SRS (Silk Road Songbook)

SRS (Silk Road Songbook) weaves threads of sound and images from five places on the ancient Silk Routes. The result is a screen-based tapestry that connects places from the artists’ ancestral homes, Istanbul and Xi’an, with cities along the way, Tehran, Tashkent, and Bishkek. Besides evoking the silk trade from China to the European subcontinent, SRS focuses on the route’s cultural contexts rather than on industry.

For the project, Ozkal and Chen took the role of explorers, crisscrossing old and new borders between Turkey, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China, though not in search of commodities but instead of transnational collaborations with local women musicians. By weaving the aural thread of songs about the land sung by each artist with the visual thread of the horizon line of the land in each of their locations, SRS portrays the Silk Routes closer to its historical context as existing before globalization became a process mediated by the bounded geography of the modern nation-state.

In this spirit, SRS is likewise contrary to imperial nostalgia, underpinning China’s drive to revive the ancient “Silk Road” in the Belt and Road Initiative to solidify its global influence against US hegemony. SRS reroutes past and neo-imperialist narratives about the Silk Routes by sounding instead the voices absent in these fabrications, women’s voices about their communities’ lands.


Millie Chen is an artist whose visual, audio and performative works are intended to interrupt habits of viewing. At the core of her projects are social inquiry and the use of sensory modes of perception in the generation of knowledge. Chen has exhibited work across North and South America, East Asia, and Europe at venues and festivals, including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Centre culturel canadien (Paris), Centro Nacional des las Artes (Mexico City), The Contemporary Austin, FILE-Rio: Electronic Language International Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, Shanghai Expo, and The Power Plant (Toronto). Chen is a Professor of Art at University at Buffalo.

Arzu Ozkal is a Turkish-born artist, designer, and researcher whose work traverses the fields of design, contemporary art, and design activism. Her work explores forms of creative and critical outcomes through social participation. She uses a wide range of media to create experiences to initiate meaningful engagements with the public. She has done extensive work with women from Turkey, Europe and the U.S. to design platforms for social exchange with the aim of understanding the conditions impacting women’s participation in contemporary culture. Ozkal has exhibited in Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Barcelona, Ghent, Istanbul, Los Angeles, and New York. Her writing has appeared in publications including Afterimage, Collaboration in Design Education, and Photoworks Magazine UK. Ozkal is a Professor at San Diego State University.