Petra Serhal

Petra Serhal and Kinda Hassan will travel to France, in partnership with the Beirut Center for Art, to complete work on “Or, when I slept for eighteen days and nights,” a performance art installation, part of it was completed during an artistic residency at the Grasse Institute of Perfume in France in 2022 and 2023. The performance treats the impact of crises, economic collapse and sociopolitical repression on the physiological state of the body. This artwork is part of Petra’s research project, “Eau de Toilette,”. She will complete the project through a residency in collaboration with other participant artists and perfumers, after which she will present the piece in Beirut and then Marseille.

“In 2020, there was an excessive market demand to document live art and to stream performances online. I felt exposed to two kinds of pressures: to watch copies of performances – online – and not to move. In the coming LIVE /laɪv/ lecture performance, in collaboration with Martin Hargreaves, we will be discussing live art and its documentation, in relation to my upcoming dance installation If You Wish to See Me Dancing, You Ought to Visit the Passing Cloud. How can we create a live engaging experience with the audience via the virtual screen, and can art documentation become the actual work of art?”

“If you wish to see me dancing, you ought to visit the passing cloud” interactive dance installation
A performance taking place in a post-apocalyptic city soaked in darkness, where remaining artificial eyes stalk, film and expose a wandering woman in the virtual realm. Instagram, as the performance’s platform, is operated as a documentation and navigation space, where the audience follows the gaze of an ‘other’ into the city, the woman, the movement and the space in between. This project is the second of a series looking at “documentation” versus “live” in performance and the experience and affect that each produces for its audience. The first part of this series which was an online lecture performance was presented during the Redzone Festival 20/21.

A sensorial live performance that explores the physical and political fragmentation in places such as Beirut, and questions the practice of choreography in this particular context.