Dani/ela Bershan: OCEAN
IKOB – Museum für Zeitgenössiche Kunst, September 2022Part of the public programme for the IKOB - Feminist Art Prize 2022
A performative sculpture by Dani/ela Bershan, 2021
Participants are invited to take their bed placed around the circular scene of a ritual. They can make themselves comfortable in the 360° set-up of OCEAN, sit or lay down or move around its core. Three performers are moving to the sounds and rhythms of breath, while the live-soundtrack composed of chanting and breathing slowly transforms from intimacy to vastness. Alongside unfolding gestures, sounds, and objects of regeneration, OCEAN seeks to merge and honour familiar acts of reproductive labour and the sacred feminine on a horizontal plane.
OCEAN is a possibility to decompose oneself alongside others, a collective, experimental, spiritual moment - not as the affirmation or construction of a supernatural or religious belief system but as an earthly insisting on concrete relations to the material, visible and tangible values of reproducing our lives on a day to day basis in a more- and other -than-human-world.
OCEAN reminds us that we are much more resourceful and connected than we allow ourselves to be.
Performed by: Dani/ela Bershan, Sara Leghissam, Aubrey Birch
Costumes: Sabrina Seifried
Photography: Paul Trienekens