Tag: identity

Dates

Perimeter is an audio visual work and interactive documentary by HYENAZ, featuring performances by Mad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Mmakgosi Kgabi, Martini Cherry Furter and Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau. It asks the question: what does it feel like to understand oneself as “just outside” and yet also “just barely inside” an identity, a concept, a philosophy, a group, a family, a home, a situation, a gathering? What is the feeling of just barely belonging? Both inside and outside? What is it like to be “foreign” to a place which is familiar? What is foreign inside?

Exhibited at Utrecht’s 2022 Come Alive exhibition on sexualities and eroticism, it maps psychic borderlands through five performers confronting their own thresholds.

Adrienne Teicher navigates the perimeter of her semi-discarded Jewishness, while Mad Kate grapples with the dissonance between an assigned-female body and a nonbinary selfhood. Mmakgosi Kgabi gazed into her complex and distanced relationship with the feeling of joy, and Martini Cherry Furter oscillates between the “authentic” and performed persona. Finally, Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau, who lives between Germany and Columbia, chose the perimeter of the peripheric body and the intersecting lines of race, gender and class present across the hemispheres of their homes.

At its core lies a meticulously edited music video—art-directed by Yeorg Kronnagel, cinematography by
Robert Mleczko—where the artists perform these unstable territories. Their movements, raw yet stylized, reveal how play and trauma coexist in interstitial spaces. The track’s industrial thrum channels Berlin’s underground techno scene, a shared habitat for all five collaborators.

During the Come Alive exhibition, audiences could access a virtual documentary on their phones in which five concurrent interview screens lay bare the origins of the spectacle. It was in these interviews that the performers uncovered the uneasy territories within their identities, describe in raw detail aspects of themselves which normally lie beneath the surface of awareness. This offered viewers a rare insight into the unglamorous scaffolding of Berlin’s queer performance ecology.

The soundscape stitches together sonic fragments of displacement: a metal fence scraped on Samothraki’s windswept hills; chatter from a Palermo café; the clatter of a Dunkirk refugee kitchen; Bartłomiej Kuzniak’s saxophone echoing through Czestochowa’s ancient caves; Alex Spree’s clarinet warped into synthetic whispers. Each sample carries the weight of its origin.

Accompanying the installation, the Perimeter EP features HYENAZ’s original composition alongside remixes by IXA and Maya Postepski aka Princess Century.

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