Katia Kameli: The Canticle of the Birds
Just yesterday, a green parakeet crashed into my office window. Great speed, loud bang, and an ugly smear on the glass. A colleague picked up the bird, but there was nothing we could do. In his arms, it looked quiet, as if asleep. I was struck by the beauty of its bright green feathers and delicate pink neck—details I could only admire up close because of the bird’s death. Only its twisted beak bore a trace of the violent impact. Dubai may be more famous for its skyscrapers than its birds, yet the city teems with them. Many birds simply pass through, migrating along the busy bird corridor connecting the Strait of Hormuz to the Horn of Africa. Rose-ringed parakeets, like the one that hit my window, reside year-round but aren’t native; imported decades ago, they found an ideal setup with plenty of water and few predators—if it were not for the city’s plentiful reflective glass windows, which the birds mistake for a vast, open horizon, only to strike at full speed. Many other species reside here, including my favourite: the hoopoe, with its elegant, retractable red crown and black-and-white striped wings. They are remarkably well-adjusted to urban life—veritable tiny zebra pigeons dotting the city’s green patches—and I love watching them from my window, strutting along the Dubai Creek in their unmistakable staccato walk.
Chorus
My beloved hoopoe’s distinctive, elongated profile appears often in Katia Kameli’s The Canticle of the Birds, where the bird figures prominently alongside watercolours and sculptures of falcons, mynas, owls, sparrows, herons, vultures, doves, and the elusive Simorgh. Here, Kameli reinterprets The Conference of the Birds,[1] a 12th-century epic poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, in which the leader of the birds is a wise hoopoe, not so different from the one strutting below my window. The hoopoe isn’t wise in a boring or stuffy way, but trickster-wise, street-smart—using its rhetorical skills to persuade a flock of all kinds of birds to undertake a dangerous journey in search of their sovereign, the Simorgh. Driven by the hoopoe’s edifying arguments, the birds fly through seven valleys—each materialising tenets of Sufi faith and practice—on their way to the Simorgh’s court. As they cross treacherous mountains, many birds perish until only thirty reach their destination. To their surprise, they find nothing there but their own reflections. The poem’s revelation relies on a Persian pun: taken literally, Simorgh means "thirty birds" (Si سی = thirty, morgh مرغ = bird). Ultimately, the birds’ quest for a mighty ruler ends in a mirror; they find their strength within themselves.
In Kameli’s video Le Cantique des oiseaux (The Canticle of the Birds) (2022) [2] actresses perform a procession while playing bird-shaped ceramic instruments, each producing a distinct whistle to form a polyphonic avian chorus. After a quote from Attar’s Conference of the Birds, the film opens on a flute player, one of these instruments in hand, against a backdrop of branches and leaves—a setting that feels fitting for a congregation of birds. Little by little, the following shots reveal a metal bar, then a concrete architectural feature, fences, and street signs. The informed viewer may recognise street names and wall inscriptions: Kameli set her Canticle in the Paris neighbourhood of La Goutte-d’Or, in close proximity to the Institut des cultures d’Islam, the film’s commissioning institution. As the alb-wearing musicians playing the ceramic bird flutes move into busier streets, their eerie procession stands in sharp contrast to the urban environment's hustle and bustle. We are not in nature, but firmly in the city.
A follow-up film, Le Cantique des oiseaux, variation (2022), was staged in a seaside garden on the French Riviera, known for its collection of plant species from across the Mediterranean. Here, the physical challenge of dancing while playing fragile ceramic instruments creates a visible tension between the performers' bodies and the delicate artwork. These earthenware sculptures are bird-shaped ocarinas—handheld instruments created in collaboration with expert ceramicist Marie Picard, who specialises in crafting functional, playable musical ceramics. To bring these sculptural birds to life, Kameli worked with composer Aurélie Sfez and choreographer Youness Anzane. This collaborative approach is familiar territory for the artist, recalling her early performance Chill out suit(e) (2002), in which the rhythmic movements of machines in a textile factory served as the basis for a sound piece developed with composer Joe Cutler. In both instances, Kameli translates specific gestures—whether the repeated movements of factory labour or the dancers’ avian choreography—into a polyphonic experience.
Interrogating History
In her own words, Katia Kameli’s use of earthenware in this body of work, for the ceramics themselves and as frames for her watercolours, is a way to “make the land sing” and bridge Attar’s stories and ecological discourse. It is, to her, a form of risk-taking and marks a shift in the materiality of her practice, which, for the last 25 years, has centred on video and photography, often interrogating archival materials and history-making.
Yet, while the materials are new, Kameli’s involvement with The Conference of the Birds is a direct intellectual continuation of Stream of Stories (2015–2019), which traced the global history of animal fables rewritten by the 17th-century author Jean de La Fontaine. His edifying fables are part and parcel of French cultural identity—formalised as an educational and moral tool, they have been staples of France’s classroom for at least two centuries.[3] I remember—not so fondly—having to recite a great many of them, par cœur, in front of the class: “Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché, tenait en son bec un fromage. Maître renard, par l'odeur alléché, lui tint à peu près ce langage …”[4]. It was probably my first and last public performance, which I realise now was part of a carefully choreographed collective nation-building ritual. Yet, as with any nationalist trope, parts of history were conveniently left aside, and few reciting French pupils are aware that La Fontaine’s fables were only one chapter of a much longer literary tradition. In the dense and complex six-chapter Stream of Stories—which manifested over the years through collages, video, textile, and sculpture—Kameli engages with these fables' long, cross-border genealogy, notably their roots in the Arabic compendium Kalila wa Dimnah, to destabilise narrow national narratives and the myth of French cultural exceptionalism.
Beyond literature, Kameli’s commitment to critically revisiting historical narratives in her two countries, Algeria and France, is most evident in Le roman algérien (2016–2019). Using video and photography, she addresses the contested heritage of the Algerian Revolution—the uprising against French colonial rule that continues to structure the political landscape of both countries. These histories remain especially contentious in France, where unease about the colonial past and structural racism towards descendants of the former imperial realm characterise public discourse to this day. Notably, Kameli’s video Le Cantique des Oiseaux is set in La Goutte-d’Or, a Paris neighbourhood of immense historical and political significance. Home to many Algerian migrants in the 1950s, it served as the Parisian centre of the Algerian Revolution and remains a vibrant, diverse neighbourhood resisting gentrification and displacement. From Kameli’s perspective, she sees a deep connection between the treacherous journey of Attar’s birds and the often complex paths of migration and exile experienced by so many inhabitants of the area she filmed in. Notably, the film ends in a community garden nestled in the dense urban fabric, setting the performance in an unexpected, lush, bird-filled paradise. While the Goutte-d’Or district is often vilified in mainstream discourse as a "ghetto" or a place of fear, Kameli’s depiction offers a subtle yet powerful celebration of a neighbourhood beloved by many.
Katia Kameli’s solo exhibition across two Paris institutions, Hier revient et je l’entends (2022), illustrated this back-and-forth between her archival and animal narratives, united by her preoccupation with history-making. At Bétonsalon, the focus was largely on Le roman algérien, while the Institut des cultures d’Islam chapter offered a wider retrospective, including many of the bird-shaped sculptures and textile works of The Canticle. Among these was Seven Valleys, a large ink-dyed curtain referencing the Sufi stages of Attar’s poem, and a series of dyed garments titled Aube—a French play on a word meaning both "alb" and "dawn"—worn by performers in the Cantique videos. In her avian body of work, Kameli explores the ancient human impulse to connect with the natural world through representation. Her bird-shaped sculptures take direct inspiration from Minoan vessels—stylised water jugs with wide-open beaks dating to the 3rd millennium BCE—which the artist encountered at the Heraklion Museum in Crete. The largest of these sculptures was Hodhod (2022), a standalone "aeolian" sculpture, temporarily set in the Mediterranean seaside garden of the second Cantique film. Played by the wind rather than humans, the work shifts the agency of song back to the natural elements. Hodhod (هدهد) denotes “hoopoe” in both Arabic and Persian—a bird Kameli repeatedly returns to in her sculptures and works on paper for its central role as the messenger in Attar’s Conference.
The New Conference
Besides examining history, Kameli’s work also sits within a genealogy of artistic interpretations of The Conference of the Birds—I will here refer only to a few of many possible artworks, attesting to the richness of a text that artists keep returning to with fresh perspectives. In Iran, where the Simorgh remains a potent symbol of pre-Islamic Persian culture, artists have frequently engaged with Attar’s text to address contemporary constraints. Parviz Tanavoli, for instance, repeatedly returns to the Simorgh in his paintings and installations, such as Simorgh in Cage (Thirty Birds) (2008) and Thirty Birds (2010); here, the flock is hopelessly trapped in a cage, evoking political conditions in Iran in contrast with the unbound freedom usually associated with flying creatures. Like Kameli, other contemporary artists have developed new readings of the Conference to address ecological collapse. In the sound and performance work an omniscience (2022), artistic duo Himali Singh Soin and David Tappeser also invoke the heritage of Attar’s Conference and pair the mythical Simorgh with the arctic tern—a bird whose record-breaking seasonal migrations, from Arctic to Antarctica and back, are increasingly disrupted by climate change. Similarly, Ali Kazim’s installation Conference of Birds (2020) featured 3,000 sun-dried clay sculptures left to dissolve in the rain. Kazim’s work is an ode not to the thirty survivors, but to the countless who perished[5]—an homage to the unsung heroes of literature and a chilling reference to the ongoing mass disappearance of birds[6].
In the watercolours and sculptures of The Canticle of the Birds, Kameli departs from Attar’s text to introduce the common myna—the only bird in her array not found in the original poem, even though its natural range includes Attar’s native Khorasan—thus bridging the realm of birds-as-symbols with contemporary ecological realities. One of the few birds deemed an "invasive" species, the myna thrived alongside the UAE’s rapid urban expansion in the 1980s. While local governments have attempted to cull them,[7]mynas—like the rose-ringed parakeet that so painfully struck my window—are now among the world’s most populous urban birds. They are often undesirable, yet among the few species successfully surviving the mass devastation of bird populations and adapting to man-made ecological disasters.
From my office window in Dubai, I also enjoy the company of a particularly loud pair of mynas. They are so assertive that they manage to intimidate otherwise reckless street cats—perhaps taking the role of Attar’s hoopoe in this noisy, everyday conference of animals. In the original Conference of the Birds, the birds are allegorical avatars of humanity who find strength in their own reflection. But in the contemporary city, this is no elegant metaphor: a bird seeing its reflection often means it is rushing toward a window it cannot differentiate from the horizon, striking at full speed. The "Seven Valleys" in which countless birds now perish are not made of treacherous mountains, but of habitat destruction, pesticide-heavy fields, and transparency-obsessed architecture. Where Attar used birds as metaphorical devices for his precepts, contemporary artists like Kameli reinterpret the stories in light of their concerns, often looking past the allegory to consider the birds seriously. The birds’ continued presence turns them into a different kind of symbol: not of a spiritual ascent, but a gritty embodiment of urban resilience and contradictory ecologies.
[1] The original title—taken from a Qur’anic quotation in Arabic—is Manteq at-tayer (منطق الطیر), which has been translated into English variously as Speech of the Birds, Canticle of the Birds, or, most commonly, The Conference of the Birds. Working in French, Kameli bases her interpretation on a versified translation by Leili Anvar, Le Cantique des oiseaux. Kameli chose the Canticle title—a term usually associated with religious hymns—to emphasize the lyrical, musical component that emerges throughout her reinterpretation of the text. For clarity, I will use Canticle when referring to Kameli’s work and Conference when referring to Attar’s poem.
[2] Camille Delatre and Paola Tomarchio, “Pourquoi lit-on autant les « Fables » de La Fontaine à l’école ?”, The Conversation, June 29, 2021, https://doi.org/10.64628/AAK.j4mr9nrjr
[3] Pick any of those delectable translations: “At the top of a tree perched Master Crow; In his beak he was holding a cheese. Drawn by the smell, Master Fox spoke, below. The words, more or less, were these.” The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, trans. Norman B. Spector (Northwestern University Press, 1988), 5; “Perch'd on a lofty oak, Sir Raven held a lunch of cheese; Sir Fox, who smelt it in the breeze, Thus to the holder spoke” The Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Elizur Wright (Ingram, Cooke, and Co.,1853), 131; “Up in a tree, a Crow had got / a cheese or cake, no matter what; / When Master fox, allur’d by smell or smoke, / first lick’d his — chops, then thus he spoke” Select Fables, trans. Charles Denis (Tonson and Draper, 1754), 83.
[4] Francesca Leoni and Mallica Kumbera Landrus, “The Conference of the Birds and its artistic legacy”, Ali Kazim: Suspended in Time (Ashmolean Museum, 2022), 75.
[5] UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, State of the World’s Migratory Species (UNEP-WCMC, 2004), vi.
[6] Vesela Todorova, “Thousands of invading birds culled”, The National, October 25, 2009.
