My practice focuses on the vulnerability, resilience, and resistance of marginalized—particularly queer, crip, and migrant—bodies under necropolitical and biopolitical regimes. My work examines what renders queer and other marginalized bodies vulnerable, how systems of privilege and exclusion shape our lives, and how our strength emerges despite them. Through my work, I ask not only whose body matters, but also whose corpse, whose loss, whose grief, mourning, and pain are allowed to matter.
I am interested in queer re-appropriation strategies with a Southwest Asian perspective, integrating ritualism with theoretical, historical, archival, and embodied research. Ritual is not only present in the performance or the work itself but infused into the entire process of art-making—from research to creation to presentation.
I work in response to the needs of each process, listening deeply to the material, the space, the landscapes my work addresses, and the ghosts residing within (salute to Avery Gordon). Giving space to unresolved grief and anger and the desire to turn them into vital forces inform my orientations and navigations.
I approach the body as both a tool and an archive—a living record of personal, collective, and ancestral histories and blueprint of the societies one has inhabited. It is an intersectional space where fears, emotions, and traumas meet resilience and strength; where limits and potentials coexist. This is what I call the laboratory of feelings, limits, and potential. In my performances, the body becomes a site of investigation within its physical, emotional, and mental abilities, disabilities, and emerging possibilities. Working with duration, I investigate the persistence of hegemonic powers while challenging the chronopolitics that sustain them.
Through this constellation of corporeality, an utopian queer political vision, and ritual, I create works that refuse to aestheticize politics yet remain accountable to the subjects they engage with—holding grief, rage, love, and possibility in the same breath, and sharing them as love letters to the audience, particularly those who have been left abandoned by the hegemonic powers, to say: you matter.
With love,
Leman