An Afternoon with Ali Sethi

Pakistani-American singer, songwriter and composer Ali Sethi invites us into a conversation on Sufism as a living artistic and spiritual practice. Drawing on centuries of Urdu poetry, devotional music and the tassawuf, Sethi reflects on longing, repetition, ambiguity and desire as forces that unsettle certainty and expand our understanding of selfhood.

In this talk, Sethi considers how ideas at the heart of mystical poetry continue to resonate across artistic forms today. Moving between fashion and nightlife, ghazal and electropop, faith and Queer resilience, Ali unpicks traditions in which lover (aashiq) and beloved (maashooq), sacred and erotic, masculine and feminine are not fixed opposites but constantly inform one another.

Part conversation and part listening session, An afternoon with Ali Sethi asks whether art might still be a form of devotion, and whether attention itself can become an act of surrendering to love.