Bodiless heads is an ongoing artistic research led by choreographer and performance artist Setareh Fatehi. Bodiless Heads is a metaphor, a hypothesis, an imaginary state that relates to the evasive, multi-layered cultures of courtesy evolved over time particularly, but not exclusively, within Iran’s [cultural] borders. Setareh explores missing bodies, absent bodies, bodies without organs, bodies that are neglected in the history of hierarchical structure of power perhaps because they reveal too much about the reality of their time. She uses her own body as a research sample. Setareh looks for the traces of the concept of body in her personal history: in her literal and visual heritage (including poems, stories, photos, movies, sculptures); illness- and health-related practices; political/physical censorship; social norms of sexuality and gender; and the ubiquitous presence of technology.


Setareh’s collaboration with Shahrzad Irannejad, researcher in history of humoral medicine in the Islamicate world, is based on their mutual desire to look at the story of body against their shared cultural background. To address the [absence of the] body against their cultural background, they use the term Bodilessness. This signifier is meant to encompass the various aspects of the undefined, undelineated presence of the body, the deliberate absence of physicality, which leaves it open to interpretation. Setareh’s engagement with the body as a tool for creating thoughts and Shahrzad’s preoccupation with the localization of mental faculties in the physical brain is the point of contact between the artist’s practice and the researcher’s field of enquiry.

2016


series of lecture-performances 


borders, bodies, flux and fluidity : Orient institute, Istanbul
a report of an image : Rooberoo mansion, Tehran
ideas in flux and bodies in movement : BRISMES Annual Conference, Edinburgh
healthy body in the medieval Islamicate world : Alte Medizin conference, Mainz
from Anarak to Mainz : IPPT conference HKU, Utrecht



https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/388974873