Diasporic Body 2015

18 Dec 2015 : Articulate Project Space, Sydney, Australia

I stand in a confused and diasporic body. Durational Performance 6 hours daily over 3 days : 18-20 December 2015. Part of the group exhibition Have Your Say. In Diasporic Body I perform, as and in, my genetically inherited and enculturated body, a terrain of self. The diasporic body, I propose, is one foreign to and absent from itself due to multiple forces of dislocation. Here it was a naked performance. Performed in a different format for the Da Dao Live Art Festival, Beijing in 2006, I presented this version almost a decade later, in an older body, and with the pressures of evacuation and crisis ever present, the Iranian refugee crisis, the Arab Spring, the collapse of the Greek economy making this work pertinent to our times. Performing as if a refugee myself, devoid of clothing, food and home, I am like an animal in a zoo, or a lost man in a cell. Diasporic Body proposes the performance of the layers of self. In its simplest terms, the body is presented in its own encasing skin, its final refuge, sheltered only by a 70 year-old grey army blanket. Beyond the notion of a homeland perpetually elsewhere, can the body in crisis even be a home unto itself? In the performance I pull at the folds of my flesh, searching for home. This work is a research on self in which I perform the layers of identity. Here I present body as terrain, as a notion of both nationhood and as a symbol of placelessness. The thing to be communicated is a feeling of discomfort, of being continually out-of-place, of having lost or misplaced something about oneself.



Project Details
Dates 18 Dec 2015 to 20 Dec 2015
Duration 3 days, 6 hours daily
Producer Articulate Project Space
Category solo
Credits

photographs : Heidrun Lohr video : Mike Leggett