Hoda Siahtiri No Body’s Body

No Body’s Body is an invitation to delve into the patterns, practices and sonicities of the lament. Embedded in oral traditions, laments convey feelings of grief and sorrow through music, singing and poetry. Drawing on her ongoing research project which engages with the singing practices of Bakhtiari women, Hoda Siahtiri proposes to stage a lament as an embodied practice of care emanating from the ‘voices of the mothers’ that resonate throughout the space. Floating between songs of mourning and sounds of nature, a series of eerie portraits carry the traces of individual and collective memories. In her exploration of the body (as) archive, Hoda performs what she calls an ‘auto-ethnographic’ gesture: while recollecting traces of her story, she deviates the codes of the exotifying and paternalistic gaze of ethnographic imagery toward an uncannily intimate dimension. Through these different layers, the exhibition maps out an embodied topography of loss, healing and remembering.  Hoda Siahtiri is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. She would like to call herself a diseuse, someone who narrates stories muted somewhere in the past. Hoda studied Cinema at Sooreh University in Tehran and holds a Documentary Film Directing master degree from Docnomads Joint Masters. She worked as a theatre actress, scriptwriter and film editor, and has directed a number of short films shown in international festivals. Since 2017, Hoda has been putting forward her ideas through the medium of performance and its endless possibilities in combination with audio-visual arts. She has so far performed in different venues including the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts and BOZAR. Since 2020, she is a PhD researcher at Sint Lucas Antwerpen and University of Antwerp where she is working on her project Singing The Silences.https://www.instagram.com/siahtiri.hoda/ Photo credit: Manuel Bischof