The Space Program Unit 4
01/2012
Solo exhibition
Coventry, United Kingdom
The Eucharist
The Eucharist is a durational performance performed in an abandoned industrial building as part of The FarGo Space Programme in Coventry in January 2012. The work lasted approximately one and a half hours and was structured around repetition, endurance, Christian symbolism and the politics of gender issues, power structures and the exposed female body.
At the centre of the performance was a dining table set for six, referring to the six days of creation. Above and around the table, an apple construction was suspended and tied with fish lines, creating a fragile architectural structure that appeared both sacred and unstable. The apples carried layered references: to Adam and Eve, to the Fall, to temptation, shame, knowledge, and the beginning of patriarchal narratives around the female body.
During the performance, Aboud repeatedly peeled apples. The action was slow, ritualistic and durational. The apple peel was then used to cover her naked body, turning the remains of the fruit into a temporary second skin. This gesture connected the biblical image of Eve’s shame with the artist’s own body, transforming the act of peeling into an act of exposure, protection, punishment and resistance.
The apples were covered in an artificial red colour that concealed their real colour. This painted surface became an important metaphor for social and religious power structures: a false layer imposed over the natural body, hiding what is real beneath a constructed image of purity, sin, desire or obedience. By peeling the apples, Aboud removed this artificial surface and revealed the tension between appearance and truth, imposed identity and lived experience.
The work connects closely to Aboud’s wider practice, which uses performance, endurance, installation, video and the body to examine how political, cultural, religious and patriarchal structures shape the individual. In this performance, Christian symbolism is not used as decoration, but as a system of power to be physically tested. Through repetition and duration, the artist places her own body inside the symbolic history of Adam and Eve, the Eucharist, creation, shame and sacrifice.
The abandoned industrial building intensified the work’s atmosphere. Its emptiness and roughness contrasted with the biblical and domestic references of the table, apples and body. The performance created a collision between ritual and ruin, sacred narrative and industrial space, private vulnerability and public exposure. In this way, The Eucharist becomes part of Aboud’s broader exploration of memory, trauma, gender, sexuality and the body as a site of rebellion against political, cultural and religious authority
