not a performance
not a performance brought together improvised movement with self-recorded audio and some objects I made in the studio, to challenge our collective responses to the current political repression. The recorded audio was my own words; and I urged the audience to move with me, finding their movements, rather than remain passive spectators.
Your Grief Is Welcome Here
Your Grief Is Welcome Here is an installation and participatory performance ritual that invites the audience to reflect on the ongoing losses of the past two years, 2023-2025. The swarm of red star bodies painted on canvas were inspired by ancient Egyptians’ depictions of stars on tomb ceilings which represented the deceased rising to heaven and the five outstretched points of the body- head, 2 arms, 2 legs. Some of the star bodies in the painting are missing limbs and distorted in different ways; and the drawing below them was made by embodying the movement of an upward explosion or blooming, with my arms.
Ecologías Solidarias
In Ecologías Solidarias, artists Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, Asma Kazmi, and Katherine Toukhy reunited as long-time colleagues to create a durational performance enacting cycles of destruction and mutual care among people, objects, and environments. The artists studied the RISD museum, noting their connections to objects in the collections that came from their Puerto Rican, Pakistani, and Egyptian heritages. From these observations, and their reflections on heightened current neocolonial destruction abroad, the artists performed a continuous cycle of excavating personal objects from plaster pillars (that mimicked aspects of the courtyard’s architecture), laborious destruction of the plaster pillars, and alchemical transformation of the remains which were then placed intentionally throughout the garden. The process opened up a space of possibility to reimagine several themes: preservation versus transformation of harmful histories, the role of artists of color in museums, artists co-creating cycles of mutual care, and the political potential of artist- led destruction and creation rituals.
