Isa Ghanayem

My practice occupies several crossroads—crossroads between pattern and poetry, ritual and time, artifact and the body, and obsession along with devotion. Curiosity is my primary medium. I draw somatic influences from my childhood and young adulthood as a ballet dancer. I seek to work viscerally. Freestyle movement as expression is a celebratory act of what is inevitable in human existence. One of many inevitabilities is the end of the experience in the imperfect human vessel. The human body is alchemical and mortal in tandem. Only a mortal existence can be an alchemical one, and an alchemical species such as humans comes with technology, the thirst for discovery, and the yearning to live without constraint. My work is a meditation on the human body as artifact outside of time as we continue to attempt to escape aging, natural disaster, decay, and our inevitable transformation into something else entirely.