Rabeeha Adnan’s Purring Table is an immersive sound installation that transforms a seemingly ordinary piece of furniture into a site of collective listening and embodied translation. Viewers and listeners are invited to situate themselves on punctuated spots carefully marked around the table. As they lean into these designated positions, they encounter subtle yet visceral sensations: the table begins to purr beneath their hands, its surface vibrating as transducers carry sound across its body. What first emerges as faint murmurs gradually unfolds into clearer voices, as if one were clandestinely listening in on a conversation.

The dialogue, presented in Arabic, introduces another layer of mediation, foregrounding the complexities of language, translation, and interpretation. For some, the conversation may be immediately accessible; for others, it resonates as an opaque sonic texture, producing a different mode of listening where meaning is felt rather than fully understood.

By engaging the body through touch, posture, and proximity, Purring Table complicates the hierarchies between sound and listener, speaker and audience. The marked spots enforce choreographies of power and submission, shaping the listener’s role not as a passive observer but as an active participant in the unfolding dialogue. Depending on one’s position at the table, the experience shifts, suggesting that knowledge and meaning are never fixed but always contingent on where one is situated.

In its quiet intensity, Purring Table evokes the intimate act of eavesdropping while simultaneously staging a collective ritual of listening. It gestures toward the gaps that exist between languages, bodies, and power structures, inviting us to inhabit the in-betweens—where sound becomes both communication and concealment, and where presence itself becomes a form of translation.