16 April 2024
Adelita Husni-Bey
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Adelita Husni-Bey, (born 1985, Milan, Italy), Italian-Libyan visual artist and pedagogue whose praxis delves into anarcho-collectivism and critical pedagogy, producing works that bridge theatre, activism, and education. Known for organising collaborative workshops and participatory projects, her work engages a wide range of participants from various disciplines, fostering noncompetitive, collective environments for exploration and dialogue. Her art has been featured in several exhibitions, including the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and These Conditions (New York, 2022).
For When Solidarity Is Not a Metaphor, Adelita Husni-Bey is presenting a reflective installation entitled Encounters on Pain (2018 - ongoing) which is a sculptural installation that addresses how capitalist imperatives condition individual subjects to perform unsustainably, and how the ideological demand of individual success depoliticises pain, pushing bodies to their literal breaking points.
The installation is the result of performative encounters, individual sessions with participants, in which they lay on a therapy bed lined with medical paper. The sessions begin by examining where the body “hurts,” using a performative score based on a standard medical questionnaire but devised to elicit responses that associate physical pain with the labour, emotional stress and political conditions that affect it.
Through dialogue and annotations taken directly on the medical paper, participants begin to create a thread between how physical pain manifests in their bodies and how they have been conditioned to treat them under the current socio-economic regime. The work is composed of an ever-expanding archive of locations where the performative encounters take place and are then displayed. Participants have the option of displaying or destroying the result of the session.
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