What memories do our bodies hold? What can our bodies tell us about ourselves, our pasts, and our futures?

Treating the body as memory and understanding the body as a site of oppression, curators, artists, and cultural practitioners explore identities, belonging, and embodied memories through diasporic, decolonial, and queer perspectives. Embodied Temporalities offers a community-centered approach as a framework for participants to voice their experiences of ancestry, rituals, trauma, death, loss, and finding expression for experiences through movement while paving the way for collective healing. The project aims to connect dots by sharing the vulnerability and true dissection and expression of displacement, identity, and heritage for people of color in Europe.

With a process driven approach, the project aims to create safe spaces for investigating bodies on multiple levels through collective workshops, performances, discussions and interactive interventions. Participants go in search of answers to questions such as: How can we collectively heal trauma? How can our bodies transform from an object that is a carrier of social constraints into a manifestation of thriving, living bodies? How do we break taboos, about gender norms, about sexualities, about death and mourning? The workshops emphasize the politics of radical self-care and imagination to enable the process of healing and empowerment. They engage with the power of a collective creativity developed amidst political and social resistance in a time of social distancing.

The outcomes, encounters and queries can be accessed through the digital archive representing voices and perspectives of 70+ artists were shared through Embodied Arts Festival.

‘Ilk tracks the roots of tolerated queer practices that goes centuries back in the Arabic and Muslim societies, basing the performance on 13th century manuscripts bridging it to all the erasure that has been applied in modern times, and understanding how the queer Arab and Muslim identity can emerge from reclaiming times were queerness and homosexuality been accepted, tolerated and even studied. It aims for a queer Arab Muslim futuristic vision, that starts with healing through rewriting our histories on our terms. Led by the social artist and dance movement therapist Ahmad Hijazi continues to practice critical collective workshops and emphasing on empowerment on bodies of color and by putting queer affirmative care into practice.

Mirage

is a durational video work by performance artist Avril Stormy Unger based on the redefinition of self and identity, through the journey of unpacking internalized societal expectations.

Ancestral Body Noise

is a project linking individuals working on their own process of ancestral technology, of embodied memory in performance practice, activism and cultural work. Explorations of how culture, inheritance, archival of rituals in the body continues to transform itself over time, while developing articulations of transformations through movement, gesture and sound. It continues to open the process to the public, inviting individuals, negotiating concepts of home, and the (re)construction of ritual for radical empathy in their political and psycho-spiritual practice. Gugulethu ‘*Dumama*’ Duma exploring the role of ritual in performance art takes poetry, movement and sounds as tools of social transformation and healing to migrant communities.

Decolonial Contemporary African Diasporic Vision

D.C.A.D.V.

Exocé Kasongo explores different narratives of the continent Africa with the aim of opening up multiple perspectives for young Afro-Diasporic people through experimental storytelling and performance interventions..

The Geography of Hate by Artist-Activist Sujatro Ghosh questions hate as a tool for systematic violence and authorization through performative collaborations.

ASCENSION

is a durational performance project curated by Dr. Maiada Aboud about gender, femininity, and menstruation aimed at building a community debate around taboos and forbidden corners of the female body.

TEAM:
Artistic Direction: Madhumita Nandi

Curation & Production Assistant: Dami Choi

Communication: Helen Gimber

Production: Oyoun Team

Curators / Artists / Performers / Participants:

Exocé Oob Kasongo, Dr. Maiada Aboud, Sujatro Ghosh, Sana Rizvi, Nane Kahle, Kopano Maroga, Gugulethu Duma aka Dumama, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Kerim Malik Becker, Cornelia Becker, Avril Stormy Unger, Ahmad BaBa, Sailesh Naidu, Suelen Calonga, Indrani Ashe, Yin Cheng-Kokott, KooChaa, Jessica Korp, Thokozani Heidi Sincuba, Maneo Refiloe Mohale, Pure, Antonia Führ, Christina Gabriela Galli, Maria Trinks , Uli Pilwax, Fadi Saleh, Farah Deen, Karin Cheng, Fatmanur Sahin, Carolin Spille, Mansur Ajang, Puangsoi Aksornsawang, Ekta Mittal, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Kathleen Hepburn, Anastasiya Miroshnichenko, Sourav Das Madonna Adib, Sonal Giani, Prashansa Gurung, Nabi A., Mandeep Praikhy, Paro, Ibrahima Ndiaye, Souleyman, Astan Meyer, K‘boko, Cérise C. Carson, Lalson Nghaite, Arijit Bhattacharyya, Sudeshna Saha Roy, Bernd Lützeler, Klaus Schmitz, Sanjay Ramachandran, Debolina Chatterjee, Sutantro Ghosh, Dinesh Pushpavanam, Angana Moitra, Deep Ray, Ankur Dutta, Aju John, Anagh Mukherjee, Joydeep de, Christopher Ramos, Nawal Ali, Aparajita Ghosh, Daria Chesnokova, Pragya Debnath, Suchetana Dutta, Lee Jong Hun, Chris Glass, Samirah Siddiqui, Ans Farhat, Gerrard, Angana Moitra, Niyati Matata, Azeez, Julia Behrens, Amr Hassan, Li Cheng, Anshuman Dwivedi, Utsav Dheeraj, Aamir Aziz, Eshna Kutty, Anoushka Kazi Rehman, Siddhesh Gautam, Maham Shahid Khan, Vasundhara Srivastava, Kalpna Puppet Theatre, Subham Mukherjee, Mahir Duman, Ghazal Ramzani, Ishwari Basu, Aindrila Mitra, Abhimanyu Prathap, Osama Anwar, Antje Weitzel, Likhita Banerjee, Ashutosh Banerjee, Mihir Sharma, Britta Ohm, Raunak Agarwal, Baldeep Kaur, Nilasish Chaudhuri, Sayan Paul, Prinzenallee 58 eG, Land Salzburg, Brut Wien.