Body Politic 15 : Translations

Body Politic 15 Translations 

‘Molecular Translations’ (2025) by Kamran Behrouz

Molecular Translations is an installation capturing the unison of queers, crips, and Mermaids. This video installation is based on a symbiotic exercise developed in collaboration with Criptonite and materialized into the performance Creature Comfort (2023). A collective of disabled and neurodivergent artists embraced a map – painted as a multifaceted fictional character – and translated it back into the space, where each actor of the collective lived within an autonomous organ of this larger fictional body. All performances in each organ began simultaneously, creating multi-layered events, guided by the motto: joy of missing out. Questioning the meaning of belonging, this practice re-contextualizes accessibility as different forms of translation. It is a practice that relies on parallel modes of translation – part of its constant flow, not a secondary or additional alternative.

Kamran Behrouz (1984) is a Visual Artist, born and raised in Tehran, currently working and living in Zurich. Their PhD, entitled ‘Cosmopolitics of the Body’, uses posthuman critical theory as a navigational tool to examine the boundaries of bodies and humanity’s embedded and embodied cultures. They work with multiple media, and combine the act of painting with animation, installations, motion capture, and (virtual)performance. Their works deal with ‘politics of location’ in association with Cosmopolitics. Kamran saturates the Queer Identity throughout their art, in order to draw a cartography of belonging and displacement. Politics of image center their visual practices, transfigured in their theoretical works, as cultural translations, coding and textual trafficking. Kamran’s latest research is related to the translation of queer-feminist texts such Sara Ahmed’s latest essay into Persian language (a language that does not register gender), and immersive art as a form of knowledge production/distribution.

https://www.kamranbehrouz.com

Contact (film, 2025) by Gustav Bengtsson

Contact - grounded in a social-anthropological perspective, my work examines how culture both disciplines and defines the human body, while also attending to the ways individuals create, regulate, and transform their own embodied realities. This installation focuses on rituals, breathing and repetitive movements associated with the lived experience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), situating them within a framework of neurodiversity.

The positioning of a body behind a fence introduces a semiotic and psychological tension that implicates the viewer. The barrier transforms the audience into a charged space of voyeurism, empathy, and constraint. In this dynamic, the audience becomes complicit in the unfolding of ritualized action.

Gustav Bengtsson (he,him) is a Swedish-Berlin-based film director, social anthropologist, and video artist who works at the intersection of research and art. Gustav has taught and conducted workshops at several universities and institutions, such as the Film School of Lillehammer, the University of East London, GlogauAIR Berlin, and Gothenburg University. He has worked as a director alongside Amanda Plummer, Ian Hart, and Jean-Marc Barr, and has had screenings at Canadian Screen Award qualifying, BAFTA qualifying, and Academy Award qualifying film festivals around the world

Bella by Lungile Lallie 

“I haven't been getting a wink of sleep for months now! This voice in my head just won't quit, so I figured if I'm gonna be up anyway, might as well have a proper conversation with it. I ended up sitting for hours in the dark, going down these incoherent rabbit holes about home, love, and the things I can never let myself talk about outside the witching hour. Found some old letters, had some realisations, confronted some truths about playgrounds and passports and unholdable hands. Wild night, honestly. So honey, come through. That darkness might feel familiar in ways you weren't expecting.”

Lungile LOVES Body Politic more than anything on earth. Lungile co-created and performed in UMGOWO as a part of Body Politic 2: Pathology, and Articulated Arm as a part of Body Politic 3: Eros. He performed CITRUS X PARADISI for Body Politic 4: Animal and had the pleasure of co-creating and performing in Survivor with Freddy Nyezi for Body Politic 5: Immunity. Lungile obtained his MA in Theatre and Performance at the University of Cape Town. 

SEX by Sange Mpambani

“From an on-going independent research project around queer night life, SEX is a live art work centered around themes of pleasure, intimacy, and queerness. In this piece I am interested in embracing the improvisational and awkward. Exploring my black femininity and queer intimacies as powerful acts of resistance and defiance.”

Sange Mpambani is a performance artist, curator, writer from eHewu, Eastern Cape. He holds a BA in Drama and BA Hons in Art History and Visual Culture from Rhodes University, South Africa. He is currently a curatorial fellow at CCA, UCT. His work explores themes of intimacy, relation, queerness in post-apartheid South Africa. He occasionally writes for the research institute ASAI.

Hlambuluka by Mercy Thokozane Minah

Trigger & content warnings: Outing, queerphobia, mention of CSA

A closeted queer person navigates being outed and reclaiming their agency through blogging, while an AI version of them siphons increasingly revealing revelations from them for the algorithm. Hlambuluka aims to question the cost of self-expression and virtual freedom that can be found on online platforms that are marred by bias and data-extracting agendas. 

Mercy Thokozane Minah is a nonbinary, queer multidisciplinary maker who creates art in visual, literary and theatrical mediums. They have been a cultural worker for over five years, making art that explores Black, queer, and trans intimacy, with a focus on the relationship between intimacy and liberation. To Mercy, art is a crucial tool for galvanizing and enacting necessary resistance against oppression. 

Ossewa; Vehicle of Conquest by Zizi Onkabetse Masizana 

Ossewa unfolds beneath the spectral frame of an ox-wagon, where dough, flour, and language ferment together. Here, Afrikaner domesticity, myth, and nationalist rhetoric are kneaded into a liminal space between memory and absurdity. Words rise and collapse, shifting between Afrikaans, Dutch, and kitchen-inflected tongues, while bread is offered as both artifact and oracle. The performance probes vroulikheid not as stereotype, but as sedimented labor, contested history, and poetic resistance and revision. It asks: what do we consume, and what consumes us? In its textures and translations, the familiar becomes uncanny, leaving history, language, and desire suspended in the air pockets trapped in the elastic gluten network which swells into bread dough.

Zizi Onkabetse Masizana is an emerging performance artist, theatre maker, cultural worker, and facilitator based between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their practice and research, embodied, are an insistence on and entitlement to white Afrikaans historical archives and sites, approached as an investigative and history-revisionist practice. Through this revision, they create interventions that question, subvert and translate historical narratives into critical and sensory experiences.