Anti/Inter-Connection  

Invited by Setareh Shabazi to communicate with the exhibitionEYES, COME BACK, Reihaneh Mehrad and Sedami Gracia Elvis Theodor Ophelia Azilinon will activate one of its stages with performances:

Goat-Heart-ing on Site-Poetics of Coward-ness/ بزدل  is an extension of Reihaneh Mehrad’s installation in the exhibition. About both, they write, “In the theology of rupture and the absoluteness of brokenness, I want to reach through the panic to get to you. In this shattered order, I found makom – המקום –, the place where my hand becomes the table, and absence sits down like a guest. All I wish… I wish I could hold the roofs up, those walls bearing their own sliver of sky: a burnt-offering-site.” 

A Heart Carving After Air centers the bed, the heart of every bedroom, as a site of reflection, imagination, and gathering. Sedami Gracia Elvis Theodor Ophelia Azilinon invites us to see it not only as a place of rest but also as a space where shadows transmute into glow – where memory stirs and the unvoiced begins to speak in the form of dreams. In their performance, the bed appears as a playground for anger, loneliness, and confession. They ask us to consider: what does a bed bring to the surface?

Together, these two performative works unfold in conversation – with Reihaneh and Sedami responding to, and carrying forward, one another’s gestures.

REIHANEH MEHRAD is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and stage designer whose practice operates at the intersection of spatial strategies and artistic research, with a particular focus on the importance of economics of queer commons in resistance and trans-communal processes. They approach scenography as a methodological tool for critically engaging with socio-political events and rendering them tangible. Through spatial and visual design elements, their work explores the complex impacts of systemic, post-colonial, and imperial structures of violence, as well as ethical laundries in theological impositions and mediated forms of proxies of touch.

SEDAMI GRACIA ELVIS THEODOR OPHELIA AZILINON is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin working with photography, new media, and sound.