About this Piece

A Statement from the Artist:

NO! originated in 2017/8 when the Trump administration forcibly separated babies and children from their mothers. This became for me a constant visceral pain. I am a mother. I am a human being. I had to say NO! in my work.

In the years since, this pain has only expanded. Screaming NO! has become increasingly urgent—against Israel’s US-funded crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank, its abandonment of our own Israeli hostages, the mass imprisonment of Palestinian children, and, here in the US, the abduction of immigrants, students, and protesters. Families are torn apart as rulers scapegoat the vulnerable for power and profit. 

We are all children, many of us are mothers. Can we remember this?

NO! is an antiphonal call that happens inside a body. The two orchestras, each with its own singer, are like two limbs of the same mental being—working together toward the scream.

The piece is about rage. A rage that gathers and slowly, relentlessly, struggles to come to the surface. It starts deep inside the body and pushes outward—antiphonally—as if the scream is a creature made of pain, using its limbs to swim upward, from the caves of the body into the open air.

Only at the very end do the words emerge:

Don't take my child away
Don't take my child
Don't
No

—Chaya Czernowin