Body Becoming

October 6, 2018

Body Becoming is a result of a year working with creative practitioners to investigate performance and how it creates and transforms the body. It aims to bring new perspectives to artistic endeavours and to situate art practice outside of traditional spaces.The primary focus is on creating dialogue between body and city by authentically engaging with both.

The larger tradition of performance art was largely unknown in Pakistan until quite recently. Performance art is usually conflated with theatre and therefore often takes on the role of spectacle to be consumed in a voyeuristic manner. This understanding of performance leaves very little room for it to grow or develop as an art form uniquely as it leaves experiential, material, emotional, interactive, or any number of facets of performance unexplored. In an endeavour to step away from a one dimensional or conventional idea of theatrical performance art, House has gathered young artists and non-artists experimenting with a wide range of themes and ideas relating to performance. This exhibition intends to provide an amalgamation of diverse approaches and subject matters of performance art in our context.

Primarily, most of the artists are dealing with bodily experience, it’s limitations, material effects, the ends of bodily endurance, relationships to other bodies, the body’s temporality and changing meanings in social contexts. Their works span a diverse set of themes, some universal, and some uniquely ethnic and gendered. Each artist approaches their role in the performance and the role of the audience differently, whether they are begging a reaction from the audience, looking to portray their experience to them, making a point, or looking for a purely internal experience. Our goal is to explore the body and its performativity in order to become acquainted with our own subjectivity, and to situate our subjectivity in our lived reality.