YOUR BEAUTIFUL SELF
INSTALLATION / MUSICAL PERFORMANCE / SCULPTURE / RESEARCH, 2015
NAAMA SCHENDAR
Your Beautiful Self is a film and performative work based on intimate conversations about trauma with researchers, scientists and trauma survivors from around the world. Looking at the portrayal of the modern traumatic experience as an interconnected global phenomenon and an extremely personal event, it binds the individual stories of the participants together into a single narrative. The participants’ faces are never revealed. Instead, they are all embodied by the artist, who lip-syncs to their different voices.
Through the speaker’s accounts Naama embodies different fictional characters that exist in a magical fantastic world, one that is colourful and strange. Liberated from the restrictions of reality, while grounded in documentary-based materials, Your Beautiful Self aims to venture beyond the consensus of trauma as disaster. It questions subjects such as identity, solidarity and responsibility, and emphasises that despite evident differences between the participants— such as age, nationality, gender, economical background and class— their commonalities are of greater importance.
BIO:
Naama Schendar is an artist whose practice explores participatory art and its social-political implications. Looking at the relations between personal encounters, larger socio-political structures, their interconnectedness and mutual dependency, Nama utilises different media to explore and (de)construct new narratives for stories we know. Nama has completed her M.A. with distinction from the Design Interaction department at the Royal College of Art, and is currently based in London. List of participants (in alphabetical order): Boaz, ex-combat soldier at the IDF, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel; Charlotte, Police officer. London, UK; Daniel Tsur, MA Clinical Psychology, intern at the T.L.M. Institute. Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel; Dr. David Lisak, Clinical Psychologist. Board President 1in6.org. USA; Fatiha, mother to a sick child. Gaza, Palestine; Prof. Metin Basoglu, Founder of the Istanbul Centre for Behaviour Research and Therapy. Istanbul, Turkey; Natasha Boston, London, UK; William Virtue, Fireman. London, UK; Yuval Roth, Peace Activist. Pardes Hana, Israel.