Artful tribute to Bombay Beach
It is dawn on Sunday morning and a sliver of blue light has begun to emerge from behind the Chocolate Mountains, illuminating the steely waters of the Salton Sea. Several dozen people, in Mad Max-chic ensembles — patchwork furs, angel wings and at least one top hat — have gathered along the edges of a crumbling berm at Bombay Beach for a performance by mezzo soprano Ariana Vafadari.
The French-Iranian performer is radiant in red against the mud-brown earth. A sherbet light brightens the sky as she issues her first mournful notes, from a song inspired by Anahita, an ancient Iranian deity associated with water and fertility.
“In these poems, she’s dreaming about the time it was green,” Vafadari tells me later on the phone, “of another life before droughts and land burnings.”
The setting was fitting. The Salton Sea, that early 20th century accident of water engineering, has become a symbol of environmental collapse, its water polluted with agricultural runoff, its desiccated playas a bonanza of toxic particulates. The lake’s smell, on the continuum between fresh fertilizer and fish meal plant, sticks to the nostrils.
Vafadari’s unusual concert was one of the closing events at last month’s fourth Bombay Beach Biennale, the scrappy art festival that goes down every year in the eastern Salton Sea town of Bombay Beach.
First held in 2016, the ironically titled biennial (held annually) is a sort-ofsecret three-day spring arts festival in locations around Bombay Beach, a 1950s-era resort town whose fortunes waned as pollution accumulated. Crumbling houses function as impromptu music venues and galleries; an old berm is transformed into an opera stage.
No museums or art foundations are involved. The biennial is funded by a loose collective whose members include Los Angeles hotelier Stefan Ashkenazy; arts patron Lily Johnson White, who serves on the board of the New York arts nonprofit Creative Time; and filmmaker Tao Ruspoli.
The festival is free, but attendees are encouraged to provide something in exchange for admittance, such as art or volunteer hours, and the number of passes to the Biennale is strictly managed: a max of 500 people.
“This is not a spectator event,” says organizer Lauren Brand, a part-time Bombay Beach resident who works in production and public relations. “It’s a celebration of the locals and resident artists.”