A Place of Memory Performance

Drawing on the same materials that constitute Conscious Matter, the performer enters the exhibition space physically bound to the Installation; textiles, structural elements, and strands of white wool connected to the performer’s hair. These bindings echo the installation’s exploration of iron in multiple forms (iron ore, iron powder, bodily iron (blood)), foregrounding the elemental continuity between human bodies and the material world.

Throughout the performance, the performer slowly releases herself from these bindings; functioning as a corporeal metaphor for the dissolution of internal constraints - memory structures, identity formations, or emotional sediment; from containment to renewal.

Meditative Prelude

Before the performance, the audience is invited to participate in a 15-minute guided somatic meditation led by sound healer Alex Ashot Ikilikian. This prepares the audience to access the sensory and psychological registers central to the performance; the body’s role as a memory-bearing entity.

Conscious Matter

Conscious Matter is an installation with many angles to explore, among these examining iron as a universal connective element - present in cosmic structures, geological formations, and human blood. By foregrounding iron’s material and symbolic permeability, the work positions the body as part of an elemental continuum.

A Place of Memory translates this philosophy:

The bindings represent the sedimentation of memories, identities, and inherited structures.

The deliberate release enacts the possibility of re-forming the self through conscious engagement with matter; the body and minerals - blood-iron and earth-iron - co-produce meaning.

In this sense, the performance functions as the kinetic, ritualistic counterpart to Conscious Matter: a cosmological premise where matter is not static but consciousness-bearing, and where memory becomes a material process inscribed in and released through the body.

Conscious Matter is centred o n iron as a dualistic connection between the cosmological and biological presence - found in stars, soil, and human blood. In liu of this dialogue, the extention of the body, the textiles, the chains and cords, all shaped through an interaction with matter, mirrors the installation, extends it, carries it further, beyond the sculptural aspect, towards a spiritual process and embodied experience.

The performance includes a constellation of sculptural objects derived from and returning to Conscious Matter. These objects are left in the exhibition space after the performance, serving as material witnesses of the transformation enacted.

Duration: Approx. 10 minutes, preceded by a 15-minute guided somatic meditation led by Alex Ashot Ikilikian.

Materials: Iron-based elements from Conscious Matter: iron powder, iron ore fragments, iron-pigmented textiles. Woolen hair-bound cords connecting the performer’s body to the installation. Metal chains constraining the body’s movement. A destructed coat composed of the same layered textile material used in the installation; functions as both costume and sculptural relic. Removed mid-performance and left as an autonomous object. A floor underlay: Large hexagonic, iron-pigmented cloth, acting as both stage and sculptural surface, remaining as a spatial documentation for the performance. 

Video of the performance TBA