Oliver Laxe extends the universe of 'Sirât' with an immersive exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum

The ‘Hu. Dance as if no one was watching' by Oliver Laxe, closely related to his feature film 'Sirât', inaugurates the new programming of Espacio 1 of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, dedicated to projects by artists and filmmakers that explore exhibition cinema.

Hu /he. Dance like nobody's watching part of the investigation and of the recordings from the movie Sirât (Grand Jury Prize in Cannes, 2025). While the Islamic term Sirât designates the bridge that crosses the hell towards paradise, in Arabic Hu is the primal sound manifestation of the deity: the divine breath and first word that inaugurate creation.

He subtitle of the piece, Dance like nobody's watching, comes from a verse by Rūmī (1207–1273), a Persian mystic and scholar whose work and practice explored the transcendence and dissolution of the self into divinity through music, dance, poetry, and prayer. In Hu, according to the explanation of museum, “we enter a territory marked by an austere monotheism, in which the search for transcendence is achieved in the immanence of both the body that dances and remembers, and in the manifestation of the sacred in the natural, architectural and sound landscape.”

The installation is deployed in the two rooms of Space 1. In the first, in darkness, a speaker pyramid coming from the ecosystem of the rave It stands like a totem. This monolith issues a sustained vibration devoid of melodic variations that, in a manner analogous to the functioning of the preparatory rooms of ancient temples, produces a kind of sound ablution in the viewer before he or she is confronted with the image in the main room. There, a installation of three projections introduces a world of desert landscapes subjected to the rhythm of a relentless sun, populated by the severe silhouettes of temples and loudspeakers, among which human figures dance.

Filmed by the artist a decade ago in Iran, these architectures refer to the concern of those monk-architects for making a sacred geometry perceptible through shapes and proportions, where the threshold between the material world and the subtle world is manifested. He sound work by Kangding Ray It addresses, from the structural materiality of sound, the mystery and sound immateriality itself.

Through hazy fades and shape overlays, Hu composes a visual grammar that accentuates the spectral condition of the image. The piece also reveals a preference for an abstract aesthetic language, both sonically and visually, which allows an interreligious experience to be approached from its formal texture without specifying it in literal iconography or stabilized narratives. The exhibition will be accompanied by a retrospective program of Oliver Laxe's filmography with carte blanche at the Museum Cinema in January 2026.