SIA Gallery
6/2011
Solo exhibition
Sheffield, United Kingdom
The solo exhibition at SIA Gallery, Sheffield, marked the end of Maiada Aboud’s PhD research and stood as one of the most demanding endurance performances in her career. Developed through years of practice-based investigation, the work brought together installation, ritual, pain, gender, cultural memory, and the politics of the female body. It presented the performer’s body not as an object of display, but as a site of struggle, resistance, humiliation, purification, and transformation.
The gallery was divided into two charged spatial zones. On one side, an apple box was filled with red apples. The apples carried associations of temptation, femininity, knowledge, sin, and inherited religious symbolism. On the opposite side of the gallery stood a bathtub and a bucket filled with blood. Between these two sides, the performer’s body became the bridge, forced to move repeatedly across the space in an exhausting and degrading action For the duration of two hours, the artist was tied in humiliating metal chains, evoking the image of an animal being restrained, controlled, and made to labour. Dragging one apple at a time from the box to the bucket of blood, the performer enacted a cycle of punishment and repetition.
Each apple was transferred slowly, through physical effort, until the bucket became full and the blood began to drip into the bathtub. The action accumulated meaning through time: the repeated journey became a ritual of endurance, a burden, and a visual metaphor for how the female body is made to carry cultural, religious, and patriarchal weight. The use of chains was central to the work’s emotional and political force. They reduced the performer’s movement, transforming her into a constrained body, marked by obedience and violence. Yet through endurance, the artist also resisted this condition. The repeated act of dragging the apples turned humiliation into testimony. The body suffered, but it also insisted on being seen.In the final phase, the artist entered the bathtub and bathed in blood. This image carried associations of baptism, sacrifice, menstruation, martyrdom, guilt, and cleansing. However, the cleansing was not gentle or redemptive. The artist brushed her body with a metal brush until bleeding, turning the surface of the skin into a place where inner and outer violence met. The body became both wound and witness.As the concluding work of Aboud’s PhD, the performance transformed research into an extreme physical act. It asked what knowledge can be produced through pain, repetition, and exposure. This was not performance as representation, but performance as lived endurance: a confrontation with the ways women’s bodies are disciplined, shamed, purified, and sacrificed within social, religious, and political structures.
