Bodies, Memory, Ritual brings together four video works that explore the body as a site of identity, memory, culture, and transformation.

• My Mother and (A)I by Kawita Vatanajyankur
• Each River Holds a Memory by Fernando Velázquez and Tiriri Rayo
• We Knew the World in Fragments of Color by Victoria Ruiz
• Repeating Patterns and Always speaking you by Swilk

Across the exhibition, performance becomes a language through which artists investigate how experience is held and expressed through the body. Movement, gesture, repetition, costume, and ritualized actions become ways of inhabiting different histories, identities, and states of being. The body can appear as a performer or an archive through which personal and collective experiences are made visible.

The works also consider how contemporary technologies can extend these embodied practices. AI, 3D scanning, and digital imaging introduce new ways of recording, directing, or transforming bodily presence. In other works, transformation happens through physical performance, symbolic imagery, and the body itself.

Bringing together different cultural and personal perspectives, the exhibition moves between inherited practices and contemporary forms, asking how bodies carry what has been passed down, what has been disrupted, and what is still becoming.

Together, the works propose the body not as something fixed, but as a place of continual negotiation between memory and presence, tradition and change, human experience and technological possibility.

Bodies, Memory, Ritual was curated by Tere Garcia, Founder of Performance in Flux.

My Mother and (A)I by Kawita Vatanajyankur

As Kawita Vatanajyankur’s mother cradles her daughter, her body becomes a living paintbrush. Each stroke of ash is both a meditation and a form of work: an embodied act of repetition, care, and discipline that echoes the daily gestures of maternal guidance.  Through the use of electric muscle stimulation, electrodes attached to Kawita’s muscles guide the movements of her arms through an AI system trained with written memories of her late father.  His invisible presence is reawakened within the performance as an echo carried through data, rhythm, and remembrance. The performance becomes a reunited gesture of intergenerational connection, where each ash stroke unfolds as an embracing ballad between lost memory and the ongoing present.

Each River Holds a Memory by Fernando Velázquez and Tiriri Rayo

Based on a myth of the Marikito Tapuyá people from Pernambuco, Brazil, this work places two distinct technologies in dialogue. Historically, many Indigenous peoples have been killed in the context of forced catechization, and they continue to struggle for their rights and territories today. This selection reinforces the importance of understanding Indigenous cosmologies as living systems of knowledge, capable of reorganizing ways of thinking about the body, memory, history, and territory.

We Knew the World in Fragments of Color by Victoria Ruiz

This work reflects on the artist’s experience of being born in Venezuela during political turmoil and leaving her native country for the United States at a young age. Through handcrafted full-body suits, coloured backdrops, and symbolic details drawn from Latin American culture and spirituality, Ruiz stages a dreamlike world where memory is shaped through the eyes of a child suspended between places. 

The film traces the scattered fragments of migration, revealing an internal landscape marked by nostalgia, displacement, and the constant negotiation of belonging. Rather than seeking a fixed sense of identity, the work embraces fragmentation as a condition of living between worlds, where colour becomes a language of survival, resilience, and faith.

Repeating Patterns and Always speaking you by Swilk

In Swilk’s performance installations, ethereal figures bound to their environment explore queer identity as an innate part of the human condition. The performers connect to objects of the Earth, emphasizing how the persistence of queerness parallels the permanence of the natural world.

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 In the face of ongoing political violence, their work asserts that to eliminate queer people would require an undoing of human nature. "We are as inherent as the Earth itself."

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