Bodiless Heads No.1: Simulacrum is a collaborative performance exploring how bodies, especially marginalised or disobedient ones, are rendered, surveilled, and fragmented. Staged at FLAM (Festival of Live Art Amsterdam) in 2016 and later at A Corner in the World in Istanbul, the project arose from an extended creative partnership with choreographer Setareh Fatehi, sound artist Pouya Ehsaei, and performance researcher Tara Fatehi Irani. The work examines absent and partial bodies, the bodies without; bodies missing from dominant visual and historical narratives, questioning the cultural hierarchies embedded in how bodies are seen and known.
In Bodiless Heads, performers are observed both present in the gallery and through modified CCTV cameras adapted for extreme macro imaging. Using retooled lenses and a bespoke 3D-printed LED lighting array, these cameras transform surveillance equipment into tools for intimate inspection, revealing individual hairs, pores, and fragments of skin. Multiple live feeds are processed in real time using custom GLSL effects and image mixing, then projected across a dual-screen panoramic projection. As performers scan their bodies, their gestures are amplified and abstracted in a spatially immersive video installation. The juxtaposition of body presence and microscopic image raises questions around the politics of visual representation.
By displacing the usual power dynamics of surveillance and repurposing its aesthetic language, Bodiless Heads No.1: Simulacrum presents a new visual grammar of the body—one where detail becomes spectacle and presence is refracted through layers of mediation. The work also subtly gestures toward the politics of visibility and control surrounding non-western bodies, often hidden, yet hyper-visible through the racialised lens of the Western gaze. The work’s collaborative framework and brutalist technical aesthetic resists conventional choreography in favour of relational, improvised image-making. In doing so, Bodiless Heads No.1: Simulacrum offers both a critique of visual hierarchies and an embodied reflection on visual perception.