Adrienne Teicher

Dates

KNOWBODY confronts the contemporary paradox of bodily erasure in an age enthralled by automation, artificial intelligence, and the lure of digital transcendence. At a time when deepfakes simulate authenticity and biometric surveillance reduces flesh to data points, the work insists on the body as an irreducible site of knowledge. HYENAZ interrogates this tension through a dual lens: the performance of the body (its capacities, vulnerabilities, and rituals) and the body in performance (its role as medium and meaning-maker within communal spaces).

The project posits live performance as a radical countermeasure to disembodiment. Unlike virtual interactions mediated by screens and algorithms, “a performance” demands corporeal presence: performers sweating under stage lights, audiences breathing in shared rhythm, interlocutors exchanging glances across a charged void. HYENAZ frames this gathering of bodies—whether in collision, collaboration, or quiet coexistence—as a political act. By assembling in physical proximity, participants rediscover what the artists term the immanent territory of the flesh: the body’s stubborn materiality, its capacity to archive lived trauma and joy, its resistance to full digitization.

Premiering on 15 June 2019 at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Studio Я—a venue historically engaged with post-migrant narratives and embodied dissent—KNOWBODY weaponizes this rediscovery. The work’s structure mirrors its thesis: live vocals rupture pre-recorded tracks, improvisation undermines algorithmic predictability, and audience touch (consensual, charged, fleeting) becomes a compositional element. HYENAZ does not romanticize the body’s fragility; instead, they amplify its contradictions—how it can be both a site of oppression and liberation, a commodity and a conspirator.

In resisting the abstraction of selves into profiles or neural networks, KNOWBODY asks: What truths persist when we stop performing for systems and start performing through our bodies? The answer, they suggest, is slime. Lots and lots of slime.