Maiada Aboud

21/7/2016 - Ben Hagefen Art Gallery

Curated by Fadwa Namneh

Photos by Sicilia Hashoul

Haifa, Israel

Walking on Thin Ice is a performance-based work that examines the fragile condition of identity, transformation, and survival within a body shaped by cultural, religious, and political histories. Presented at Beit HaGefen Art Gallery in Haifa, the work was originally created during my Master’s studies at Coventry University, where I developed a practice concerned with the body as a site of ritual, conflict, memory, and social inscription.

The title suggests instability: to walk on thin ice is to move through danger, knowing that the surface beneath may crack at any moment. In this work, the body becomes that unstable surface. It carries inherited signs, imposed colours, wounds, beliefs, and expectations. The performance unfolds through three connected phases, each marking a stage of symbolic transformation.

The first phase begins with the peeling of the apple’s original skin. This action evokes the removal of an outer layer, suggesting exposure, vulnerability, and the violence of being stripped of one’s natural or inherited identity. The peeled apples are then dipped into artificial colour, replacing the original skin with a constructed surface. This gesture speaks to social and political processes in which bodies are recoloured, renamed, disciplined, or forced to appear differently in order to belong. The apple, often associated with temptation, knowledge, and the body, becomes a charged object: no longer natural, but altered.

The second phase involves bathing in red colour. This action carries a double symbolism. On one level, it refers to baptism, a ritual of cleansing, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. On another level, the red colour evokes blood, sacrifice, pain, and historical violence. The body is not simply purified; it is marked. The performance therefore questions whether transformation can ever be innocent, especially when it occurs under conditions of conflict, patriarchy, religion, and political pressure.

The third phase is the emergence of the transformed body and objects after these rituals of removal and immersion. What remains is neither the original state nor a complete renewal, but a suspended condition: a body walking between identities, between purity and contamination, between belonging and exclusion. The work does not offer resolution. Instead, it presents transformation as a risky passage, one that leaves visible traces on the skin, the object, and the space.