:mind me, your body:
performance:2022:
:‘‘Stamp’’(2020) is an acrylic painting that represents Adyali’s body in its basic form. It shows a young woman’s body with all its tender and aching parts highlighted; her neck, shoulders, arms, hands, nipples, vagina, legs, and feet.
All the parts of a woman’s body that are objectified, promoted, romanticized, and defined in sexual discourses, have been trapped in pieces of clothes and jewelry to be more of something in a frenzy marketing system.
All the parts of a woman’s body should be altered, shaved, fixed, nourished, and ornamented to be accepted in modern society.
All the parts of a woman’s body that ache, bleed, and mean more than what normally is, a part of a perfectly functioning body.:
:Her body was able to fit into a 140x60 cm canvas.
She painted her whole body with acrylic paints and pressed it onto a canvas with the purpose of transferring everything that is related to her physical appearance and everything that comes with it.
Also, she hoped this transfer would include every experience and pain that her body is carrying along.
The stamp had to carry at least some of the physical tolls to be a woman. The stamp had to take over all the responsibilities of having that as a body.
In a way, a reset, a rebirth, so she can continue living in that body like it was anew, eluded from all of its burdens. A blank sheet of paper of a body, ready to use as a vessel to continue existing on this planet.
She wanted Stamp to take all the weight and evil off of her, like the picture of Dorian Gray. It was created for a similar reason, it was created so that Adyali could continue living as all the damage would be done to the representation of her body, not hers.
However, she must live with it.
She must befriend her.
She must keep her alive too.
She drags it all around, reliving every memory that the Stamp carries.:
:In this performance ‘‘Mind me, your body’’, Adyali portrays how one cannot choose her body and has to live with it, how a person cannot escape from their body.
She is tied to this body of hers physically and mentally. As one cannot escape from it, one must nurture it, take care of it, satisfy its needs, and more importantly protect it.
From time to time we wander off within our minds, forgetting we are indeed in our bodies when we are sitting on a bench, walking to a place, going to the groceries, or in the middle of a conversation. So we just take off, leave our bodies, daydream, and question different matters in our minds.
Being present means experiencing all the pain that our bodies hold, that’s why we try to get away whenever we find a chance. In this performance video, Adyali shows how the process of living her daily life in her skin feels like and how it interprets to living as her means.:
© Adyali 2024