Performance / Installation
Collaboration with Nadine Shaban
2017

This durational performance explores the generative tension between the body and materiality, investigating the ways in which the body becomes both site and tool for transformation. Central to Nadine Shaban’s practice is a deep engagement with the physicality of making — acts such as tearing, stitching, mixing are not merely technical gestures but are imbued with symbolic weight, echoing cycles of rupture and repair, fragmentation and cohesion.

Over the course of five hours, the performers enact a series of continuous, evolving movements that draw attention to the temporal and tactile dimensions of the work. Rather than presenting a fixed object or outcome, the piece insists on process as form — an unfolding material ecology shaped by gesture, repetition, and endurance. In this way, the body becomes a kind of void or open site, both absorbing and emitting meaning, memory, and sensation.

Shaban is particularly interested in what she calls "the exterior skin" — the constructed surfaces we wear, shed, and reassemble in relation to our environments. This outer layer is not merely protective or decorative, but a porous membrane through which identity, vulnerability, and transformation are negotiated. By activating her materials through performance, she invites a reconsideration of the boundary between inside and outside, self and other, subject and object.

The durational nature of the piece allows for a slowness and accumulation that resists spectacle. Time is stretched, dilated, allowing viewers to experience the subtle shifts in energy, rhythm, and form that emerge from sustained physical engagement. In doing so, the work underscores the radical potential of presence — of being-with material, of inhabiting time differently, of encountering the body not as fixed or knowable, but as a living, shifting terrain.

All sculptures and garments by Nadine Shaban.