Ghinwa Yassine Performance: How Far Can a Marked Body Go?
© Ghinwa Yassine, still from the lecture performance How Far Can a Marked Body Go? (2023). Photo: Sam Tarling
As part of the HTMlles Festival
How Far Can A Marked Body Go? sheds the light on what the bodies of Lebanese women, marked by war and patriarchy, are capable of enacting. In this performance, that is based on the 2019 uprisings in Beirut, Ghinwa Yassine aims to reinsert the body of women into the Lebanese historical narrative by portraying an agentic gesture, one in which a body is acting and not being subjected to. Through an interplay between re-enactment, archival images and animation, she tells a story of using one’s embodied agency in the public arena and asks questions around boundaries, safety, appearance, and disappearance. How Far Can A Marked Body Go? insists on an incompleteness, repetitively shifting between the modes of lecture, performance, and video installation. Ultimately, Yassine is writing a story in space.
Animation and technical direction: Conor Provenzano and Arman Paxad
Technical assistance: Elke Dick Archival photos by Sam Tarling, Nabil Ismail and Richard Hall.
The artist wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its support.
© Ghinwa Yassine, still from the lecture performance How Far Can a Marked Body Go? (2023). Photo: Sam Tarling
Ghinwa Yassine is an anti-disciplinary artist based on the land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people, so-called Vancouver. Her work uses various media, including film, installation, performance, text, and drawing. Yassine’s work confronts the ideological and patriarchal systems that she grew up in while exploring collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. She seeks a radical historicizing of individual and collective traumas where embodied memories are put into question. Using hybrid forms of storytelling, where story manifests as somatic experiencing, ritual, and gesture, her projects are portals to factual/fictional dimensions that activate collective memory.
