16.05.2024
Replaying It Again – Symposium 15.5.24 – 18.5.24
Farah Saleh
What My Body Can/t Remember: Body Memory as Archive
Saleh presents a short film, of her dancing in a studio space. The dancer’s movements are accentuated by the light streaming in from the wide windows, and the close-up dynamic between cameraman and dancer performs a masterful fusion of movement and picture. Yet, neither party is completely lost to one another. Her graceful, free-form dance, breathwork and movement would suggest years of dance training, yet she still carried a raw, experimental essence. Her gestural movements captivating.
Saleh’s performance lecture integrated live dance and film with interwoven context rooted in her past experiences.
Live Performance
As she ran around in a circle, her feet made rhythmic sounds, although similar in texture and sound each temporal sound print differing, picking up pace. Sound evolving outwardly. I imagined this to be a small living room, possibly running around a small coffee table or another domestic object, while the artist was under curfew in 2002. Running around in circles, maybe to expel/exhaling energy. Maybe, breathing, moving as a form of resistance from Israeli military order and control. Her breathing, gradually louder, panting, also carried a rhythmic pattern along with her feet it was ritualistic both in terms of domestic dimension but also a louder excess that exerted out of her body. Like a breathing geopolitical landscape. Instead of keeping it in, in the prison the Israeli military attempted to assert, neither the domestic space or the artist’s body could be obtained. Restricted but resisted its frame, she reimagines its possibilities then and now as an inseparable form of freedom. I wouldn’t say re-play, but finding what is already there, and making it present.
Saleh then moved into a dining room, small squared wooden table and chair, she wrote on two pieces of paper in Arabic and sticks it to the wall. I am unsure on what it said. But the action, seems to be a reminder of sorts.
At times the artist moved in various ways, fingers in the mouth pulling the side of the cheek, what would usually be a childlike gesture brought to the surface, a horror, children being pulled apart, starving, the mouth empty and hungry. Saleh pulled her mouth and gestural sounds echoed in the theatre. The visceral quality made the work immersive, on a collective level it dispersed a live account, making it a shared body of sorts, bringing the current pain and Saleh’s exhale to the forefront. What is usually a detached far way enough ‘concept’ and othering of another’s pain was felt in this thought-provoking and bodily experience.
In the next part of the performance, Saleh asked us to close our eyes, and to imagine a moment in time and to outwardly gesture this moment. In the dark spaces of my mind, I held out my arms, asking why but no words came to the surface. I was a weird child but found comfort in nature. It was the playground, and I was fascinated by the tree where the white colour brought out its structural properties. And on this tree was a collection of bright green caterpillars. They were vivid grass green. I took one to look at, as I held out my palm flat the caterpillar moves along my fingers. Either proud to show the caterpillar or found out, a miserable teacher’s assistant came over, took the caterpillar, and stamped on it. In this dark place the crunching of its body was incredibly loud, I held out my arms asking why but no words came.
The artist filmed the audience and showed stills on the screen. Some gestures were held solely in the face, the determining muscles varied, some faces appeared concentrated creating slight frown lines, some a minimal smile the corners of the lip barely pulled but in the closed eyes there was a relaxed comfort, as though smiling in the warmth of a loved one. One person held one hand up, possibly returning to the classroom. Saleh then deleted these stills. I held no nostalgia or sense of loss to the image itself.
In the Q& A
Saleh spoke about the performance as a form of dissemination, and I felt an affinity to this sentence, as I feel a constant need to defend my live art practice on these terms.
Reflection
The active body offers something in real time, a shared experience, something that differs with every iteration. And performance as practice ideally would be the practice in which it is seen, for me, it opens so many possibilities in the present moment. History lives in us, it’s not something that is filed away. Saleh’s work ‘experiences’ this. The body is not an object. The body operates differently, it converges the now and then in constant flux in movement, a mobile presence with no strict linearity to time.
