CAFFEINE
Solo Performance | George Wood Theatre, London | 2023
CAFFEINE forms part of an ongoing research inquiry into masculinity, spatial memory, and postcolonial social architecture within Algerian café culture (el kahwa).
Developed through performance-based and autobiographical research methodologies, the work examines cafés as socially coded environments structured by tacit rules of visibility, access, and belonging. Within these spaces, masculinity is not merely represented but rehearsed - produced through gesture, posture, silence, and repetition.
Staged within a constructed ‘ghost café,’ the performance operates as an embodied research environment. Sound, movement, and spatial arrangement function as analytic tools, enabling an exploration of how memory, migration, and inherited social scripts shape contemporary male identity.
Rather than offering narrative resolution, CAFFEINE positions performance as a method of inquiry - a site where personal memory intersects with collective habitus, and where postcolonial imaginaries become materially perceptible.
unnarated
Installation / Recorded Performance | P21 Gallery, London | 2021
Unnarrated is an installation developed by the MOU7i6 Collective examining feminine spirituality and mysticism within North African cultural contexts.
Through fragmented moving image, reflection, and performance, the work interrogates how spiritual knowledge circulates beyond written documentation. Drawing on research into oral histories and ritual practices shaped by the influence of Islam in North Africa, the project considers forms of knowledge that remain resistant to codification within Western epistemological frameworks.
The collective’s inquiry centres on what might be described as the “external inaccessibility” of certain spiritual traditions - practices transmitted orally across generations, often destabilised by colonial disruption and diasporic displacement. Rather than attempting to fix or translate these traditions into linear narrative, the installation foregrounds fragmentation as a methodological choice.
Unnarrated positions artistic practice as a space for engaging with knowledge that exceeds language, examining how collective memory, belief, and social performance operate within and beyond dominant paradigms of documentation and historical legitimacy.
museum of leila
Movement & Dramaturgical Development
Fashion Film | Victoria & Albert Museum, London | 2021
Museum of Leila is a fashion film directed by Nadira Amrani, commissioned as part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Friday Late programme in collaboration with Art Jameel
Set within the V&A after hours, the film follows a fashion student who becomes locked inside the museum overnight. As she moves through its galleries, garments by designers Karim Adduchi, Tatyana Antoun, and Nabil Nayal animate the space, transforming the museum into a surreal terrain where heritage, fantasy, and diasporic imagination converge
My contribution to the project centred on movement development and dramaturgical shaping, supporting the translation of fashion into embodied narrative. Working across choreography and spatial composition, the process considered how the museum operates as both archive and stage - a site where Middle Eastern and North African design histories are recontextualised within Western institutional frameworks.
Rather than treating couture as static display, the film mobilises garments as performative agents, interrogating how diasporic aesthetics inhabit and reconfigure canonical cultural spaces.
Un_touched
Photographic Series | SomoS Art House, Berlin | 2021
Part of the group exhibition - Un_Touched is a photographic series examining the politics of intimacy, visibility, and emotional access within non-conforming experiences.
Developed through a process-based approach, the work translates personal narratives of non-conforming identity into visual compositions structured around repetition and circular movement. Rather than presenting fixed portraits, the images explore the body as a site where affect, memory, and social restriction accumulate.
The circular dynamic within the series reflects recurring patterns of desire, distance, and disconnection - suggesting how emotional and physical intimacy can remain simultaneously present and inaccessible. Through this visual framework, Un_Touched considers how identities shaped outside normative structures of belonging negotiate visibility, vulnerability, and relational space.
Trauma Then, Trauma Now
Filmed Performance | Manchester International Festival, Manchester | 2020
Trauma Then, Trauma Now examines the embodied and intergenerational legacies of the Algerian Civil War (1991–2002), situating contemporary psychic rupture within longer colonial and postcolonial histories of violence.
Developed through archival research and performance-based inquiry, the work responds to the material and environmental aftermath of the conflict, including the large-scale forest burnings that accompanied counterinsurgency operations. These scorched landscapes function as both historical record and metaphor - sites where political violence and ecological devastation converge.
Created in collaboration with dramaturg Illyr, the filmed performance employs gesture as a method of reprocessing memory. Drawing on principles associated with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), the choreography disrupts linear recollection, allowing the body to move through repetition, rupture, and recalibration.
Rather than narrativising conflict, the work positions performance as a site of somatic investigation - interrogating how colonial trauma persists across bodies, landscapes, and generations, and how embodied practice might offer alternative forms of witnessing and reframing.
