Within Body

2023-24

Vinyl stickers and Acrylic Paint

Within Body is an interactive installation of traditional Yemeni dance notations exploring how cultural practices are approached and observed in the contemporary world, creating an absent-body performance. The viewers follow their bodily rhythm to figure out the dance and unconsciously perform cultural rituals without fully comprehending it, showcasing the foreign familiarity one can have over one's culture. While it focuses on Yemeni dance, it opens a wider conversation about how dance is a form of protest and resistance by celebrating the body and history of a culture’s social status, while showing caution about how performative displays of culture could lose their depth and authenticity from the overconsumption of what culture is sold to be in the contemporary world.