May 20

May 20 The White Rabbit's Wandering: Samina Virani and the Art of Getting Gloriously Lost

Ninu Nina

Art, Creative People, Culture, Interviews

FOR ARTISTS, CREATIVES AND

THE CULTURALLY CURIOUS

What happens when you throw a manifesto, seven birds, and a train full of artists into the Mediterranean?

Samina Virani knows.

Forget the gallery openings and the polite applause. Samina Virani's art practice reads like a fever dream scribbled in the margins of a Sufi poem, equal parts philosophical rebellion and sensory adventure, with a healthy dose of strategic chaos thrown in for good measure.

For over a decade, she's been chasing the invisible, the in-between, the things that slip through the cracks of what we call "reality." Her teachers? Sufi mystics, Kabbalistic scholars, sacred geometers, and the sensory alchemists at Teatro de los Sentidos. Her classrooms? Middle Eastern deserts where silence speaks louder than words, Costa Rican jungles thick with ancient knowing, Brazilian wilderness, and Mediterranean port cities where East and West have been trading secrets for millennia.

This isn't your typical artist residency bio. This is someone who literally deconstructed the concept of pilgrimage by putting it on a train.

The Crystal Express: When Performance Art Meets Mystical Railway

In 2012, inspired by the 12th-century Persian masterpiece "The Conference of the Birds"—where seven birds journey across seven valleys seeking enlightenment—Samina did what any reasonable artist would do: she recreated it as a 14-day train odyssey across Europe and into the Holy Land.

Seven artists from her collective "the rabbit hole" boarded in Barcelona. The route carved through Paris, Berlin, Gyoma, Bucharest, Istanbul, before arriving in Tel Aviv—each city a valley, each border a veil to be lifted, each moment a chance to dissolve the constructed realities we mistake for truth.

Watch the journey unfold in Gandja Monteiro's film for Adidas—because yes, somehow this mystical experiment also involved athletic wear sponsorship. (If that doesn't capture the beautiful absurdity of the project, nothing will.)

The artists didn't perform at these places. They performed with them, staging provocations, unraveling narratives, tapping into what they called "magic consciousness"—that liminal space where logic loosens its grip and intuition takes the wheel. Like Attar's birds, they relied on wit and improvisation, letting the stories reveal themselves rather than forcing them into being.

The Rabbit Hole Method: Mysticism Meets Methodology

By 2021, all this wandering and wondering had crystallized into something teachable: "the rabbit hole method." It's a process of poetical inquiry that pulls from contemporary art practices, philosophy, mysticism, mathematics, and dance, basically everything your art school professor told you couldn't possibly go together.

Think of it as a toolkit for accessing the subliminal codes running beneath everyday consciousness. It's structured enough to be repeatable, wild enough to surprise you.

Her work manifests as performative research—poems that move like installations, drawings that read like scripts, interventions that blur the line between art and lived experience. Everything is process. Everything is inquiry. And most importantly, everything is grounded in the body, the senses, the immediate experience of being alive and awake.

The Practice of Beautiful Disappearance

Samina's individual research practice centers on self-inquiry through deconstruction—taking apart the myths we live by, the journeys we think we're on, the inner landscapes we barely dare to map. She enters deserts and jungles not as tourist or even explorer, but as someone learning to read the invisible text written in heat, humidity, silence, and stars.

This is playful mysticism at its finest: serious without being solemn, rigorous without being rigid, esoteric without being exclusionary.

Explore the full Crystal Express project

The rabbit hole collective continues to evolve, creating residencies and interventions that ask participants not just to make art, but to question the very ground they're standing on. It's art as pilgrimage, pilgrimage as practice, practice as a way of dissolving the layers between who we think we are and what we might become.

And somewhere, on a train or in a desert or in a port city at twilight, the white rabbit keeps moving—not running late, but right on time for an appointment with the unknown.

Because the deepest research isn't about finding answers. It's about learning to ask better questions while gloriously, mystically, utterly lost.

https://www.101010n.com/the-art-of-remembering:

Contact whiterabbit@101010n.com