A b o u t   O R Y X :
Oryx is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary performance artist, movement practitioner, researcher, archivist, and writer. Oryx’s artistic work spans contemporary dance; butoh; immersive theatre and acting; durational performance and installation art.

They investigate the embodiment of cultural histories, queer theory, gender and class politics, and psycho-somatics. Their work tends towards the political and philosophical: using speculative world building mechanisms and conceptual or poetic writing to postulate and structure their practices. Through their Literature and Art History studies, and later their various movement and dance studies, they became interested in the intersections of critical theory, movement, and bodywork, and the means by which movement and consciously modified experiences through the body can resignify socially encoded experiences of the body, intimacy, self concept, and affect.

Oryx works as a freelance researcher, archivist, educator, and in galleries, as well as a performer. They host workshops and facilitate spaces, they have experience curating and producing events largely in independent scenes, such as experimental music, experimental short film, and in art contemporary and modern galleries. Their university studies revolved around the history of science through cultural artifacts; neurology, psychology, and philosophy of mind applied to narrative theory; and the analysis of cultural movements through literary and object based artifacts.

Their further research topics included the cultural history of sexuality within the museum context and the private erotic art collection of Naomi Wilzig, conducted with the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami and Humboldt Universität; to the practice, documentation and institutionalisation of performance art with the Guggenheim in Venice; and methodologies of archiving the lives and histories of children during wartime, through children’s voices, drawings, games, and documents as well as adult retrospective accounts, as in independent research projects for documentary film. They are dedicated to the preservation of many various cultural histories, whether through historical document, artistic artifact, or through bodily reinterpretation and transformation.

In their solo or duo dance practice, they are generally interested in using characters as the basis for composition, especially those from marginalised archives or personal histories, using a combination of poetry and archive as means by which to access and represent ‘felt histories’ (which can be understood as historical forces felt bodily; embodied language or the symbols of the body; and the divergent memory systems of the body). They are interested in accessing these characters and creating symbolic compositions and actions in space through body-based mechanisms, such as exhaustion and physical limitation; counterbalance; fixation and gaze; interpersonal relations and intimacy; control, suspension, and release; and gesticulation as a means to access unconscious symbols. These principles or mechanisms can be understood as pivots upon which many images and associations may emerge.

In their solo butoh and durational performance practice, they use speculative world and character building to explore posthuman and queer ideas of inhabiting other possible bodies and entities, relating to concepts of cognitive estrangement and mechanisms for engaging one’s critical imagination, in which our reality may be rendered both legible and strange. In these performances they often create wearable sculptural installations or prosthetics, sometimes augmented with electronic components. This practice relates also to their theoretical research on object ontology and objects as metaphors, which can be understood as a desire to excavate a kind of ‘symbolic anthropology’ through objects.

Feminism and queer theory are constant undercurrents to their work: fortified by a desire to critically reflect on and renounce power structures as well as to technically challenge the overarching and instantiated structures of their practices. However, the desire to do so is at once united with a desire to subvert, to make strange and poetic, to escape simple or easy definitions.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oryxvlrn/