sometimes art begins with a question – sometimes art ends with a question, 2020
Border-Free Zoom-Performance

On May 1st, 2020, an international artists’ collective took action with an online performance.

This virtual work was a border-free spoken word performance via Zoom (a video conferencing platform). The written piece consisted of a series of rhetorical questions (270 in total) that were read by performers in turns during the live Zoom session. A variety of artists performed; by variety, we mean different genders, languages, races, nationalities, cultures, and geographical locations. During the performance, Spanish, Korean, Farsi, German, Chinese, Kurdish, English, Hebrew, and Vietnamese languages were heard.

The world is at home in an attempt to slow the spread of a global pandemic. Before this novel coronavirus, there were many other urgent socio-political issues that are all-but-forgotten now, though no less urgent, including thousands of children separated from their families, and detained by the U.S. government. These times we find ourselves in present a unique challenge for the performance artist-activist with the physical nature of such work – especially the exchange between performers and audience/people. We all have needed to change the ways in which we interact with the world, the ways we communicate, gather, influence, question, and really the ways in which we now live.

Rather than see this new situation as limiting, we can instead find within it opportunity.

Performers in order of appearance:

Andrés Molano Sotomayor
Chaehee Yoon
Cima khademi
Jenny Vogel 
Lin Bo
Negar Ahmadi
Nima Nikakhlagh
Richenda Cope 
Sam Tarplin 
Xuan Pham

Written and orchestrated by Nima Nikakhlagh