Risk of Infection
Syracuse, 2014Risk of Infection is a performance in which I use my body as a screen, projecting a 15-minute VHS recording of my circumcision ritual while simultaneously translating the conversations from Turkish into English.
The work seeks to re-inhabit the sensation of a formative past experience, transforming the body into both witness and medium. By revisiting this intimate cultural rite, the performance exposes the gendered obligations inscribed onto the body and frames the act as a site of negotiation between memory, identity, and power. At once personal and political, it also functions as a therapeutic exorcism as a means of confronting and releasing the intensity of a memory that continues to possess.
In its social dimension, the performance indicates the miscorrelation between the ideas of “manhood”, body, and circumcision.