Bodies, Memory & Trance
My work explores the body as a living archive — a site where memory, history and violence are not only remembered, but physically inhabited. Through photography, sound and installation, I investigate embodied forms of memory: gestures, rhythms, voices, breathing, trance.
This axis focuses on states of transformation of the body — ritual practices, trance, collective movements — as spaces of resistance, healing and transmission. The body becomes a medium through which invisible histories surface, where personal and collective memories are activated beyond language.
Practices such as the Zār ritual are approached not as folklore, but as contemporary archives: fragile, political and deeply situated. Sound plays a central role, creating immersive environments in which the viewer’s own body is engaged, affected and displaced.
Rather than representing the body, these works seek to activate it — as a space where memory circulates, persists, and is continuously re-inscribed.
My work approaches the body as a space of pain, resistance, and transformation.
Whether filming the exhausted bodies of protesters intertwined with dance, or photographing the vacant stillness of Egyptians who understood the revolution had been lost, I explore how the individual body becomes a vessel for a collective one—fragile, exposed, yet politically charged.
My own experience of chronic pain runs through this practice, shaping a sensitivity to micro-gestures, tensions, and subtle movements that carry what words cannot hold.
The skin—central in my doctoral research—binds these layers together: a boundary, a porous surface, a membrane where forms circulate. It becomes a conceptual hinge linking artworks, bodies, and the histories that imprint themselves onto them.
