Zahra Fuladvand’s performance opens the group exhibition Borderline Situations, which explores questions of displacement, belonging, and the boundaries that shape our personal and social experience. Zahra Fuladvand’s work is closely connected to these themes: through the body, the gaze, and the space it creates, it reflects on migration as a lived condition and on the fragile process of finding one’s place between cultures.
“Nine years ago, I moved from Iran to Budapest, and since then I have been moving between two cultures, searching for a place where I can be both present and rooted at the same time. The veiled figure in the work is a metaphor for myself: the veil marks a body that carries its own history, language, and memories into a new social environment, where the experience of distance and unfamiliarity is still present.”
At the beginning of the performance, two performers stand back-to-back, their bodies touching, as if they formed a single figure looking in two directions. One performer wears a veil and holds a large mirror toward the audience. The other stands behind her with closed eyes, holding a pair of scissors and a bundle of grass whose roots hang upward in the air. Together, they move slowly in a circular motion. As the mirror turns toward the audience, it reflects their faces back to them. The mirror becomes a site of confrontation and awareness: who is watching whom, and how do we look at those who seem different from us? The space is filled with bundles of grass hanging from the ceiling, their roots suspended in the air, surrounding both the performers and the audience. These inverted roots evoke the fragile condition of belonging: being torn away from an earlier environment, and the difficulty of taking hold in a new place. Again and again, the artist attempts to cut the grass; this gesture makes visible both uncertainty and the search for stability.
Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/797642310060059
📅 2o26.o4.o7, 19.oo
📍 1085 Budapest, Mária u. 1
🔵Határhelyzetek is the Budapest exhibition of the LEAP – LEgAcy in Progress: (Re)Constructing European Narratives and (De)colonising Discourses project.
🔵The exhibition is open to the public only during the accompanying events and by appointment.
🔵The exhibition is co-funded by the European Union’s CERV program