Selwa Abd is a Moroccan-born, New York–based interdisciplinary artist, composer and design researcher working under the alias Bergsonist. 
Her practice engages 
time-based media, sound, and performance, focusing on the reconfiguration of archival material –found sounds, processed sounds, and live video– into immersive audiovisual environments. 

Drawing on electroacoustic and musique concrète traditions, and informed by Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Henri Bergson, her work employs electronics, DIY instruments, granular and spectral techniques to examine postcolonial identity, techno-futurism, and the psychological and perceptual effects of virtuality in contemporary culture.

Her methodology foregrounds intuition as a critical and operative framework through which these inquiries are developed. In performance contexts, her work blurs distinctions between the real and the virtual, proposing speculative temporalities while confronting the tensions of the present.
Drawing on her design background, she complements her sonic tapestry by creating more complex archival frameworks, as seen in her latest projects such as ASL and As If Reality.

Abd has collaborated extensively with artists across contemporary art and experimental music contexts. Her compositions have been presented in contemporary art exhibitions and institutional settings, and she has produced remixes for musical artists, including Depeche Mode.

With a career spanning over a decade, she has been invited to speak about her practice and community projects, as well as to serve as an interviewer following her work on the PUTF podcast, on panels in NYC including Moogfest, MoMA PS1, and New Inc, and in classes at The New School, CalArts, and Pratt.

She has curated musical and non-musical events for projects such as Bizaarbazaar, Pick Up the Flow, and 3afak, as well as for compilations she/other labels have released. Her curatorial work is an ongoing and integral part of her practice, often operating quietly in the background.

She is a recipient of the NYSCA x Roulette Artist Grant (2025), NYFA x Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment’s Women Fund Grant (2024), The Jerome Hill Artist Alternate Award (2023), the Issue Project Room Residency (2022) and Harvestworks Technology Immersion Program Grant & Fellowship (2022).

Selwa has shown works at MOMA Ps1, Roulette, Moogfest , National Sawdust, EKKO Festival, Mutek Festival, Sonic Arts Festival, Issue Project Room x The Center for Performance Research, Basilica Hudson, Fridman Gallery, The James Gallery, 47 Canal, Batalha Centro De Cinema and The Brooklyn Film Festival to name a few.

Selwa has earned recognition from outlets including The Washington Post, BOMB Magazine, GQ, Resident Advisor, Mixmag Mena, NPR and Artforum. 
Her discography spans over a decade, including more than 7 albums, 15 EPs, and countless featured tracks on various compilations.
Her music has been released on labels such as Optimo Music, Sony and Tresor Records.

Selwa is the founder of the NYC based community resource Pick Up The Flow and the publishing imprint BIZAARBAZAAR. 
She's been a NTS Radio DJ resident since 2018                                                                                                                                                                                                     
⤷ design portfolio


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ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ, 2025

ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is Selwa Abd’s new multimedia project that delves into ancestry and Amazigh heritage. 

The first audiovisual iteration premiered at Roulette on September 18.  Commissioned by Roulette and supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the work emerged from Selwa’s recent journey to Morocco, where she visited her great-grandfather’s village near Errachidia in the southeast of Morocco. From this experience, she began building a visual and sonic archive that she now seeks to expand into new contexts. The visual archive can be explored here.


Concert review by “I Care If You Listen” (by American Composers Forum).

 

ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ CD Album, 2025

© ℗ 2025 BERGSONIST 
With support from The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and 
Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts.

Liner Notes by Rob Goyanes:
The origins of things are almost always blurry. The Arabic word for “origin” is أصل, which transliterates roughly as “ASL.”
In the language of the Amazigh people, who are indigenous to North Africa, it's written as ⴰⵙⵍ. Selwa Abd’s project, taking these words as its title, is an exploration of her own Amazigh origins in Morocco 
(Amazigh means “free people”). 
Born in 1992 in Casablanca, and living in New York since 2010, Abd’s musical practice hinges on electroacoustic experimentation and 
rhythm-based electronic music. 
Over the last few years, she’s expanded into multimedia formats, and started digging deeper into post-colonial history and identity. ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is her most personal project yet—pulling material from recent visits to her ancestral village in Errachidia, a region in southeastern Morocco, Abd fuses musical traditions and speculative sonics. 

Abd captured field recordings during these visits, which include “conversations with people in the village, walks in the souk, the ambient sounds of an oasis near the Sahara dunes, and the sounds of stones in the quarry where my father once worked,” Abd says. 
Her father’s father was a big inspiration for this project as well. A trade unionist who helped organize mine workers and electricians in Morocco—labor struggles were crucial in the resistance to French colonialism—he worked to establish training centers, healthcare units, and social housing. Abd’s grandmother, the matriarchal core of the family, is also a significant presence in the project: the sounds of some of her inherited instruments can be heard on these recordings. 

ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is a portrait of the Maghrebi soundscape, processed through Abd’s eclectic approaches to sound and composition. Voices from Abd’s field recordings are manipulated to create far-out textures. Acoustic samples of a bendir, a type of frame drum, and a qraqeb, a sort of iron castanet, can be heard on this CD, as well as the polyrhythmic rhythms found in North African musical traditions: Gnawa, which consists of religious chants, trance-inducing repetitions that can sometimes last for hours, and Chaabi, a popular folk music played at weddings and festivals. But rather than mere documentation of a place and its culture, Abd takes this material and pushes it into new spaces, showing that not only is the past a blurry thing, difficult to apprehend, but so is the future. Honoring her history as well as her own innovations in electronic music, Selwa Abd’s ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ is a bridge between what’s done and what’s to come. 

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