k!k! kaz!m!
Convulsions by Kiki Kazimi | 2024
Concept
Convulsions is a multisensory, performative exploration of memory, body, and landscape, reflecting on nostalgia, femininity, and ritual. Inspired by Jarboe’s Circles in Red Dirt, the project began as a drawing exercise while listening to music and evolved into a combined assignment incorporating sculpture, performance, photo etching, and metalwork.
A steel hairbrush with metal bristles becomes the central object, recorded brushing hair in front of a vanity mirror whose surface was partially scratched away. The footage emphasizes both the physical act and its reflection through the damaged surface, creating a tension between intimacy, distortion, and ritualistic gesture.
A diary of hand-etched metal plates bound with welded rings documents the process, with some pages etched overnight to create hollow textures. Photo etchings of stone circles, castle grounds, and island edges capture a return to Ireland after three years, layered with selected textual fragments exploring memory, melancholy, and presence.
The project investigates the intersection of embodiment and mysticism, combining performance, object-making, text, and photography to create a site where gesture, materiality, and memory converge.
Selected text excerpts:
“I am dancing in the clearing of a forest, the moonlight kisses me, the grass around my feet intertwines with my toes, my spirals bear the weight of lead,”
“The twilight horizon splits open and the cosmic rays grazed my cheek, how could one deny the gestures of a supernova?”
“A land where melancholy and cheer dance hand-in-hand, where saudade spirits linger and float like fog flirting with the ground.”
Materials
Steel hairbrush with metal bristles, vanity, performance video, scratched mirror projection, metal-etched diary, photo etching, text, found objects, razor blades, nails, drawing, welded ring binding
Credits
Created and produced by Kiki Kazimi