- Correspondance (Shimmer)
“What if shimmering is how you experience time passing? Here and gone, here and gone, here and gone … with an emphasis on the here in the here and gone.” – Deborah Hay
Shed your skin. Compose your body to be invisible. This is a durational choreographic inquiry calling into question notions of edges and boundaries. Through dazzling gestures of shimmer and camouflage, movements of ever-changing co-presences and figures unfold throughout the compound grounds that evoke the slippery nature of “here-ness.”
2023
Performed at and commissioned by Kulturakademie Tarabya in Istanbul, Turkey.
Durational Live Performance
Duration: 3 HoursPerformed together with Aslı Bostancı, Melih Kıraç and Kamola Rashidova.
- Correspondance (Surface)
Correspondance (Surface) is a multi-media installation convening a textile architectural scenography, four visual-effects processed moving images played back on life-size (190cm/75inch) upright monitors, sound design and a series of activating live performances. Correspondance (Surface) interweaves embodied and digital choreographies to explore and question the boundaries between physical and virtual bodily spaces.
The four digitally manipulated moving images display life-size silhouettes of dancers who appear on the screen as intangible cinematic figures, whose fugitive movements both resist and elude the demand for recognition, detection, and identification. These “video-sculptures” reconfigure the moving images as corporeal agencies that operate like virtual dancers in the exhibition space.
Surrounding the video-sculptures is a textile installation based on spatial designs of “dazzle camouflage” — employing a variety of fabric panels to intervene into the given spatial structure of the exhibition space. The iridescent, shimmering quality of the fabrics invites viewers to experience the space through the interplay of (dis)appearances and reflections —creating a choreography of (in)visibility by dazzling the correspondences between the four video-sculptures, which occupy the four pillars in the four corners of the exhibition space.
A series of durational live-performances unfold throughout the exhibition, both activating the installation as well as leaking out into the entire museum space. These durational choreographic inquiries equally call into question notions of edges and boundaries through dazzling gestures of shimmer and camouflage — unfolding movements of ever-changing co-presences that evoke the slippery nature of “here-ness.”
2022-23
Exhibited at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt/Main in Germany.
Commissioned by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in cooperation with the Museum Angewandte Kunst, both in Frankfurt/Main in Germany.
Exhibition was generously supported by SAHA, Istanbul; Stiftung Kunstfonds; Neustart Kultur; BBK and Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.
Multimedia installation and activating live performances convening a large-scale textile architecture made from iridescent fabrics; four VFX-processed, digital moving images played back as seamless loops on life-size (190cm/75inch) upright monitors with sound; and a series of three durational live performances performed across the duration of the exhibition.
VFX: Hugo Guerra
Cinematography: Arturo Bandinelli
Sound: Sophia Loizou
Scenography: KAMI BLUSCH
Fabrics: Kvadrat
Dancers in moving images: Murat Adash, Maria Ghoumrassi, J Neve Harrington, Matthias Sperling
Live performances: Co-choreographed by Murat Adash and Tarren Johnson and performed together with Katja Cheraneva and Tümay Kılınçel - Correspondance (Belonging)
Correspondance (Belonging) is an interactive one-to-one performance designed to be encountered between one performer and one audience member at a time. During each thirty-minute performance, bodily acts of movement, speech and sound are employed to guide each audience member through a series of choreographed and improvised elements that explore attention, awareness, sensation and relation as forms of collective embodiment and being-in-space together.
Exploring belonging as a process of co-becoming through reflecting on notions of boundaries and negative space in the context of an affective encounter, Correspondance (Belonging) probes acts of responsiveness and response-ability by establishing an intimate encounter in a relationship to belonging, where belonging is not bound to any specific location but to a system of movement.
Drawing on feminist, queer and diasporic concepts of belonging and relations with others, Correspondance (Belonging) touches on boundaries and borders as zones of contact to re-imagine other ways of being-in-space.
2021
Commissioned by and performed at Mosaic Rooms, London, UK.
A series of one-to-one performances, performed to one audience member at a time.
Eleven consecutive performances a day. Each performance is 30 minutes long.
- Correspondance (Morphology)
Correspondance (Morphology) is an exercise in moving through thresholds and boundaries of the self. The movement commits to a single gesture – that of morphing – unfolding over time. The potential of morphing allows for the shifting and changing of identity, as well as model an energetic presence at the threshold of self-perception. The act of morphing, as a constellatory, ephemeral coming-to-appearance, evolves in the space of the museum on a moment-by-moment basis, triggered through a collective becoming-with ebbs and flows while occurring through a co-constitutive manner amongst all the present bodies. Together, all elements in space contribute to an entangled process of becoming-with one another. The seemingly simple yet complex choreographic improvisation emerges through continuously moving through rhythms of morphing – creating complex accumulations of different bodily (trans)formations, shapes, orientations, rhythms, velocities, and trajectories. Throughout the motion of the piece, contingent and improvised structures reach in and around the audience, gently shifting and reconfiguring established constellations in space – reorganizing, shape- shifting, boundary-probing the patterns of a potential new becoming. Through experimenting with variable morphologies of co-presence, Correspondance (Morphology) attempts to create an encounter of rethinking (both bodily and psychically) a mutual field of potential relations.
2020
Exhibited as part of the exhibition Akis/Flux at Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul, Turkey.
Commissioned by the Marina Abramovic Institute and Sakip Sabanci Museum.
Further support from the Hessische Kulturstiftung, Germany.
Long-durational Live Performance
Duration: 144 Hours (Performed six hours daily, across four consecutive weeks) - Correspondance (Contact)
In Correspondance (Contact), two protean subjects both move through and are moved by their surroundings – an amorphous urban structure resembling mountainous landscapes. An improvisatory dyadic composition, of a somatic camouflage, unfolds between concealment and exposure through bodily acts of melting, expanding, twisting, shaking, collapsing, shading and coloring. Oscillating along the threshold as well as osculating around the edges of self, is where the dyad surfaces, where they touch and are touched by each other; and it is from this porosity where they touch upon their environment. Through an embodied, sensuous correspondence, they perceptibly co-respond to one another by blending into their environment not by becoming invisible, but, rather, through rehearsing the problem of locating oneself, and thus, the problem of location. For to camouflage is precisely the blending of figure and ground, of interiority and exteriority, and thus corporealities and spatialities, and hence, they practice, at the surface of their skin, a chameleonic being-of-the-world. Intermittently, apparitions of bodies of water, light and color crop up and disappear – living materials that co-perform and correspond as they appear on the vibrating interface between surface and depth. Together in interplay, Correspondance (Contact) emblematizes a trans-subjective becoming of animate being, both human and beyond the human, allowing for a shared geometry to emerge.
2019
Produced for 1000 Ecologies at Le Commun, Geneva
Supported by Utopiana, Geneva4K Video – Single channel video projection
Video duration: 24 minutes on loop
Correspondents: Murat Adash & Lucie Eidenbenz
Cinematography: Arturo Bandinelli & David Huwiler
Sound design: Alyssa Moxley
Produced by: Utopiana - Correspondance (Touch)
Correspondance (Touch) unfolds as a polyphonic, entangled constellation between all the present bodies – set amidst a light projection, that, while marking the duration and space of the performance, gradually, like a sudden change of weather, transitions from complete lightness to darkness. The light projection – through its gradual transition over an extended period of time – is itself a co-performer, a living material, whose task it is to not only delineate a space and mark a duration, but to form a threshold space, a diaphanous presence, an ephemeral localization constituting a playing field and boundary where the field of relations themselves become mobile. From here, the choreography touches upon the boundaries between the performers and their audience as a generative space through processes of sensuous correspondence and wit(h)nessing, so that these very boundaries can both be called into question, while at the same time acknowledging their affordances. Correspondance (Touch) employs movement as a relational practice, negotiating individual bodily boundaries, mobilizing them as corporeally co-responsive matter, slipping and leaking into the other as permeable and porous interfaces. In so doing, the boundaries themselves become dynamic and alive. Thus, the choreography unravels as a bodily encounter where one can camouflage and cross oneself into the other like a threshold, while touching and being touched, watching and being watched, moving and being moved, by the other.
2019
Produced for 1000 Ecologies at Le Commun, Geneva
Supported by Utopiana, GenevaCorrespondents: Murat Adash & Lucie Eidenbenz
Light design: Alessandra Domingues
Videography: Jeff Vercasson
Photography: Neige Sanchez - Similitudes – A Duet
Similitudes – A Duet is an exercise in proximity and distance. The choreography emerges out of the field of relations between the dancer and the wit(h)ness, set against a rhythmic light alternating between lightness and darkness. Through a game-like structure, the dancer invents rules and systems, both choreographed and contingent, predictable and unpredictable, as ways to measure the shared space – calling into question the boundaries of the self. The movement unfolds in a constellatory flash – a sudden, ephemeral coming-to-appearance – testing out the process of mirroring and the capacity to mimic to see how similarities crop up and disappear. Extending movements both out of and back into the body, the dancer measures relationships of alternation, overlap and unison through the threshold of darkness. The immersive hold of darkness, which blurs the boundaries of the bodies in space, evokes a dialectics of seeing, in which subjects become fused for a brief moment, like in a flash. As the rhythmic cycle is repeated, awareness expands. Through organizing and accumulating recognizable structures and shapes, the dancer channels gestures and geometries of resemblance, correspondence, similarity and difference to illuminate a situation.
2018
Performed at Mountain of Art Research, LondonLive Performance
25 Minutes
Performer: Maria Da Luz Ghoumrassi
Cinematography: Ariel Artur - One in the Other (Part One)
One in the Other is a choreographic exhibition extending across two interrelated, yet independent, parts: a corresponding moving-image and a live performance. Entitled after a Surrealist game, the inter-independent parts form a mimetic relationship with one another. In both part one and two, a group of eleven performers assemble to create a living environment in space: through bodily acts of mimesis, distinctions between self and other become porous and mobile. Rehearsing the reciprocal interplay between the self and other, inside and outside, the game-like choreographies, both live and on screen open up a tactile experience of intra-subjective co-presence. Part one invokes a ritual of contact and contagion, implying a back and forth movement: understanding of the group involves repeated circular movements between the individual and the group. Part Two further extends those movement patterns into a live situation and relation with their audience through play. As a whole, One in the Other (Part One and Part Two) channel forms of attunement or correspondence that amounts to a kind of contagion as an attempt to challenge notions of boundaries.
2018
Screened as part of How Can Large Mountains enter Small Ice? at Delfina Foundation, London, United Kingdom. Supported by Delfina Foundation (London) and SAHA Association (Istanbul).4K Video and installation
Video duration: 12:30 Minutes on loop
Cinematography: Arturo Bandinelli
Sound design: Alyssa Moxley
Text: Sarah Wang
Filmed at: Studio Wayne McGregor
Performers: Ioanna Bili, Jilly Connick, Francesca Costa, Roberta Gotti, Ripp Greatbach, Oriana Haddad, Sean Murray, Lorenzo Nocentini, Bakani Pick-Up, Miriam Tsehai and Alice Weber. - One in the Other (Part Two)
One in the Other is a choreographic exhibition extending across two interrelated, yet independent, parts: a corresponding moving-image and a live performance. Entitled after a Surrealist game, the inter-independent parts form a mimetic relationship with one another. In both part one and two, a group of eleven performers assemble to create a living environment in space: through bodily acts of mimesis, distinctions between self and other become porous and mobile. Rehearsing the reciprocal interplay between the self and other, inside and outside, the game-like choreographies, both live and on screen open up a tactile experience of intra-subjective co-presence. Part one invokes a ritual of contact and contagion, implying a back and forth movement: understanding of the group involves repeated circular movements between the individual and the group. Part Two further extends those movement patterns into a live situation and relation with their audience through play. As a whole, One in the Other (Part One and Part Two) channel forms of attunement or correspondence that amounts to a kind of contagion as an attempt to challenge notions of boundaries.
2018
Performed as part of How Can Large Mountains enter Small Ice? at Delfina Foundation, London, United Kingdom. Supported by Delfina Foundation (London) and SAHA Association (Istanbul).Live Performance
Duration : 20 Minutes
Performers: Ioanna Bili, Jilly Connick, Francesca Costa, Roberta Gotti, Ripp Greatbach, Oriana Haddad, Sean Murray, Lorenzo Nocentini, Bakani Pick-Up, Miriam Tsehai and Alice Weber. - To the Extent
In To the Extent, a group of performers move between a set of corporeal constellations, establishing fluctuating stages of contact and division amongst each other and their audience. By exercising strategies of dispersion, re-assembly, and reciprocity, the performers build a complex accumulation of gestures and bodily compositions, within which the audience becomes complicit. As bodies in a constant state of transformation, the performers both adapt to and interrupt their surroundings, thereby mapping alternative mechanisms of belonging. Through morphologies of physical arrangements in space, ranging from a wall of living bodies to gestures of alignment, camouflage and disappearance, To the Extent attempts to inquire into the architectural potential of social relations – seeking to uncover the ways we exist in built spaces.
2016
Performed at Alt Art Space, Istanbul, TurkeyLive Performance
Duration: 30 minutes
Performers: Tarcin Celebi, Ilgün Ceylan, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Derya Dinc, Eylul Dizdar, Cemrehan Karakaş, Irem Nalca, Gamze Öztürk, Ebru Sargın, Gültuğ Yenidoğan - Industrial Intimacy
Inspired by Dan Graham’s 1975 performance Performer/Audience/Mirror, a group of six performers re-imagine his seminal work by transforming a constructed office space into a self-reflexive stage. Utilizing body language as the primary means of communication, the performers become agents in establishing a temporary social system: through rule-based game systems, structures of improvisation and play, Industrial Intimacy inquires into the potential of an embodied event, probing what bodies can do.
2016
Performed at Cabaret Voltaire as part of Manifesta Biennial, Zurich, SwitzerlandLive Performance
Duration: 50 minutes
Performers: Patricija Bronic, Noemi Clerc, Désirée Myriam Gnaba, Alice Joerg, Andreea Pintece and Ilona Stutz - The Adoption
In choreographing fluctuations between movement and stillness, The Adoption produces polarized states of chaos and order. Further complicating this dichotomy is a perpetual reversal of roles. The audience become performers amongst the erratic movement, and return to spectatorship in moments of stillness. Here, the orderly construct of art-viewing is done away with and the audience becomes complicit in the work – they are within it, rather than outsiders looking in.
2015
Performed as part of the exhibition Primary Care at Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, United StatesLive Performance in collaboration with Stephen Kwok
Duration: 20 minutes
Performers: Jennifer McCool, Maggie Harrington, Jessie Winslow, Joseph Cappabianca, Pia Cruzalegui, Yannan Huang, Meghan Dowd, Mayra Rodriguez, Marina Miliou-Theocharaki and Paula Nacif - Stare
By means of changing physical arrangements along a set of stairs, a group of fifteen performers establish micro choreographies amongst visitors traversing two levels of an art fair. Through establishing changing viewing positions and counter-perspectives, the performers establish with their gaze shifting modes of including themselves into, and excluding themselves away from, the visual sphere. As a spatial scenario, Stare investigates the complex spatial and social relations between objects, bodies, and elements of the built space and probes how physical constellations of stillness can initiate different ways of movement through these kinds of spaces.
Performers: Katie Adams, Lisa Bloom, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Tyler Centanni, Robin Chen, Vicki Chen, Annie Cottrell, Emily Fenn, Laurel Foglia, Maggie Harrington, Susanna Hostetter, Yannan Huang, Jenny Kim, Helena Martinez, Alyssa Moxley, Jeremy Pauly, Caitlin Peterson, Matt Ryan, Christine Shallenberg, Patrick Segura, Elizabeth Smarz, Maryam Taghavi, Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Keijaun Thomas, Suzanne Torres, Jake Vogds, Ronda Wheatly, Chen Chen Yu, among others.
2014
Performed at EXPO Chicago – The international exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, United StatesLive Performance
Duration: 30 minutes (in intervals) - Body Building
In Body Building a group of seventeen performers assemble next to each other, shoulder on shoulder, establishing a second wall around the margin of a square room. Occupying the entire dimension of the room from wall to wall except a small opening, their gaze is directed towards the empty space. Upon entering, the spectators – through their own bodily compositions in space – intentionally or unintentionally, start to perform as well. Through shifting dichotomies of simultaneous movement and stillness, of watching and being watched, Body Building creates a face-to-face encounter and a body-to-body situation to test out symmetries and asymmetries of co-presence.
Performers: Katie Adams, Naama Arad, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Claire Bauman, Bow-Ty, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Chanhee Choi, Annie Cottrell, Jenn Cooper, Elise Cowin, Angharad Davies, Emily Fenn, Laurel Foglia, Alessandra Gomez, Tia Greer, Oriana Haddad, Stevie Hanley, Maggie Harrington, Brittni Hessler, Wei Hsinyen, Josh Hoglund, Yannan Huang, Dana Heeyun Jang, Jenny Kim, Francis Kondorf, Stephen Kwok, Alyssa Moxley, George William Price, Patrick Quilao, Rachel Ramirez, Charles Rice, Erica Ricketts, Matt Ryan, Michal Samama, Christine Shallenberg, Erin Smego, Olive Stefanski, Lisa Stertz, Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Keijaun Thomas, McKenzie Thompson, Hannah Verrill, Caz Wallace, Caleb Yono, among others.
2014
Performed at Risk: Art and Social Practice (curated by Tricia Van Eck) at 6018 North, Chicago, United StatesLive Performance
Duration: 30 minutes (in intervals across exhibition duration) - Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point is a choreography for five performers. Moving on demarcated lines, each performer holds a glass vessel. Each vessel contains a sound device that amplifies one voice. Each voice maps and speaks from the same script at different speed. Together the five voices create a chorus building up in space as the movement unfolds – until each voice is drowned once the movement approaches its limit.
2014
Links Hall, Chicago, United StatesLive Performance
Sound, custom speakers, glass vessels
Duration: 11 minutes
Performers: Lisa Stertz, Erica Ricketts, Tia Greer, Jennifer McCool and Lucas Black - Sightseeing
A series of performances and public interventions inquiring into relationships of sight and site.
2013
1st Performance: Itinerants – we stir our way onwards (mixing as we go)- in collaboration with Hannah Verrill for EdgeUP Festival (curated by Tricia Van Eck), Chicago, United States2nd Performance: Sightseeing, performance as part of group show Roads Scholar (curated by New Capital), Iceberg Projects, Chicago, United States
Live Performance and Public Interventions
Performers: Stephanie Acosta, Murat Adash, Keijaun Thomas, McKenzie Thompson and Hannah Verrill - Place is a Pause in Movement
A group of six performers sweep through the Great Hall of the Chicago Union station. Walking in the pattern of a vanishing point, they slowly move ahead. As an act of rehearsal they shift, migrate and re-arrange collectively. With each pause between their steps they create a new constellation in space – time becomes spatialized and mobilized at once. Place is a Pause in Movement establishes a choreography of spatial and durational organization in relationship to belonging, where belonging is not bound to any specific location but to a system of movement.
2013
Chicago Union Station, US
Exhibited at Iceberg Projects, ChicagoHD Video
Single channel video
Duration: 13 minutes
Videography: Gonzalo Escobar Mora & Casey Puccini
Performers: Hannah Verrill, Stephen Kwok, Elise Cowin, Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Kevin Barrett, McKenzie Thompson - Vertical Resistance
2012
Digital Photographs
Dimensions in print: 24″ x 16″ / 60cm x 40cmExhibited at Motorenhalle Dresden, Germany and Surp Yerrortutyun Kilisesi, Istanbul, Turkey
- Vessels of Infinite Geometries
2012
Swell Gallery, San Francisco, USPerformance Installation in Three Acts
Ellipsoidal lights, parabolic speaker, paper, chalk, triangle, sound, live performances