Until the 11th of January, 2024, NIKA Project Space (Dubai) is hosting I Can No Longer Produce the Limits of My Own Body, a group show curated by Nadine Khalil (an arts writer, editor, researcher, art critic, and curator). The artists taking part in the exhibition are Liane Al Ghusain, Mirna Bamieh, Isaac Sullivan, Dalia Khalife, Sara Nirookbaksh, Lilia Ziamou, and Christiane Peschek. In their artworks on view, they explore bodily practices in the age of technology and challenge the conventional boundaries defining our bodies.
Liane Al Ghusain presents her series Womb Amulets related to her personal and cultural background. The collection comprises 29 clay spheres. Inspired by the artist’s grandmother who used to cross-stitch, each sphere is composed of two parts stitched together. Al Ghusain inscribed coded prayers in these pieces, referring to 29 Palestinian women held in illegal prisons.
Mirna Bamieh displays her multimedia installation Sour Things: The Kitchen consisting of drawings, ceramics, text, video, and ferments. Created by NIKA Project Space in tandem with artist Isaac Sullivan, the artwork presents the fermentation process as a method for improving our propensity for listening, learning, and caring.
In the exhibition, Dalia Khalife is represented by her performance dedicated to the exploration of the boundaries between the human form and technology. The artist exercises remote sovereignty through her human-like avatar, an interactive chatbot speaking and responding to emotional cues in nuanced movement.
Unveiling the symbolism of crystallisation, Sara Nirookbaksh‘s project The Tabalvour (2020) refers to her mother’s battle with cancer. In the performance, the artist immersed herself in a pot of hot saffron-infused sodium borate and documented the crystallisation of her skin. She also crafts crystals on objects which belonged to her mother (picture frames, shoes, etc.).
Lilia Ziamou showcases her series of textured sculptures related to bones as a metaphor for the body. To produce them, she scans the bones of anatomical models and uses 3D printing techniques. Ziamou’s art making process, which combines classical techniques with digital ones, results in numerous transformations which allude to the body shaped through technological interventions.
Christiane Peschek‘s immersive installations and self-portraits encourage self-reflection and self-awareness. Among the subjects she is interested in are different forms of digital consciousness in a contemporary present characterised by intimacy creating dialogues between humans and technology.
About the participants
Liane Al Ghusain (b. 1987, Kuwait City, Kuwait) is a Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist who graduated from New York University Abu Dhabi with an MFA in Art and Media. Her practice involves using various mediums, such as video, sculpture, text, and textiles. The themes she is interested in include mysticism, feminism, post-colonialism, and sci-fi.
Mirna Bamieh (b. 1983) is a performance and culinary artist residing in Beirut (Lebanon). In her work, she explores the politics of disappearance, memory, and the social issues and limitations of Palestinian communities. In 2018, Bamieh founded Palestine Hosting Society, a project intended to restore traditional Palestinian food cultures that are in danger of disappearing.
Isaac Sullivan (b. 1980, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Dubai. In his work, he explores technology (including AI) and its relationship to altered perceptions of time, employing video, installation, and sound. While working with the latter, he uses text-to-speech software, virtual analogue synthesis, and field recordings.
Dalia Khalife (b. 1992, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and scenographer who lives and works in Beirut (Lebanon). She works across audiovisual installation, site-specific interventions, video, objects, painting, and performance. In her practice, the artist examines psychophysiological happenings within power structures, social events, and rituals. Currently, Khalife’s artistic research focuses on human-animal relationships through a lens of gender relations and expression.
Sara Nirookbaksh (b. 1981) is an Iranian-born artist based in Canada. Her art practice lies at the intersection of body, science, technology, and new media that engage the globalising feminine psyche. She experiments with various projects involving living tissue, chemistry, virtual reality, and performance.
Lilia Ziamou is a Greek interdisciplinary artist who resides in New York City (USA). In her works (sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings), which allude to the body transformed through technological intervention (physical and digital), she explores such themes as identity, self-expression, beauty, and decay.
At the core of Christiane Peschek‘s (b. 1984, Austria) work is the observation of the body on both sides of the screen, between on- and offline identities. Rituals, retreats, retouched images, scents, and ethereal materials (Wi-fi radiation and low frequencies) become hybrids of virtual transformation in a post-internet reality. Interacting with near-body technologies such as smartphones, she examines the “hyper-ego” by using the surface of touchscreens.
To learn more about I Can No Longer Produce the Limits of My Own Body, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in attending A Way With Light, a group show at ATHR Gallery.
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