the stripes don’t wash off

performance, 2023

An exploration in fluid exchanges of power, agency + identity — manifesting as an interplay between myself and an imaginary software that collects data from my body and its movements. the software facilitates a call and response relationship, where an increasingly passive aggressive voice tells me what to do — press your body firmly into the pad, rinse off, return back to the starting position.

I often tell myself if I had all the answers I wouldn’t be an artist, I’d somehow solve every problem and take away every pain — but for now, I'll search for different pathways to feeling, being with feeling, + questioning what we feel. I draw from my experiences as a queer person, as an arab american, as a queer arab american — who lives in a united states that has proven itself consistently during my lifetime to be unwilling, or perhaps lacking in capacity, to feel for the communities I am forever intertwined with.