Performance: Foreign Body by Ines Borovac

As part of SWARM, an exhibition featuring more than 40 works by artists based at ISO, 18-21 November Inspired by the parasitic logic of systemic violence, A Foreign Body examines the body as a site of infection, shaped and destabilized by the hostile conditions that produce somatic trauma. The work interrogates pathways through which violence embeds itself beneath the skin: in the belly twisting feeling of estrangement, the exhaustion caused by the constant state of fight or flight, the panic-attacking nausea, and the gag inducing apathy. These are symptoms, embodied consequences and the conditions of a body violently denied belonging. Concealed beneath the apparent neutrality of rules, laws, and social norms, systemic violence penetrates the body like a parasite, attaching itself like a tick, coiling through it like a snake relentlessly infecting new hosts. A Foreign Body exposes this invisible occupation of the body, revealing the violent and nauseating struggle of a body attempting to expel the parasite of systemic violence from its home.

Ines Borovac (she/her) is a Croatian multimedia artist currently based in Amsterdam. At the heart of her practice lies the body as a site of resistance and inquiry: a vessel held between the visibly violent gestures of tradition and the imperceptible violence of the digital. Drawing on lived experiences of Balkan traditions and the tension between Eastern and Western cultural frameworks, Borovac uses her own body as a site where visible and imperceptible forms of violence and desire converge. Shifting between absurdism, vulnerability, spectacle and roughness, her work materialises through live performances, multimedia installations, moving images and performative objects. Her work has been presented in Kunstinstituut Melly, Museum of Contemporary Arts in Zagreb, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Garage Rotterdam among others.