Shireen Hamza




my artistic practice is part of my scholarly life & includes EMBODIED RESEARCH METHODS, Performance, sound and video



As a scholar of medicine and embodiment, and a person living with chronic illness, I cultivate my own body as a site of research. I study practices of attention and attunement with dancers and somatic practitioners, through which I have learned to facilitate group inquiry and improvisation.


I work in sound and image to interrogate and play with archival material and to build creative relationships with medical practitioners. Working in a variety of media enables me to make work that is about the body and in it, that explores medical history while being therapeutic.




I have also brought group improvisational practices to site-specific performances. In "Hide & Seek," Anjal Chande and I improvised together for over an hour at the Arts of Asia wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, guided by its colonial history, "seeking comfort in an alienating place." We drew attention to the ways we are (not) allowed to physically inhabit the gallery as a part of "Cripping the Galleries," co-curated by Maggie Bridger and Sydney Erlikh. The image, a photograph by Alice Feldt, shows Anjal and I wearing blue vests and moving on a window sill. Seated, Anjal faces the window, left arm raised in an arc, white screen discarded beneath her. I lie wrapped in a cloth scented with sandalwood, moving very slowly across the wood, towards her.





Seven dancers from chicago's disability dance community move in groups on a marley floor, some seated, lying down, standing, in close physical contact. they work with a score titled "Stone."



iMAGE of ten contact improvisation dancers improvising movement in a range of positions on a sprung wooden floor at oberlin college, mostly in pairs



Scores for humoral medicine



In a recent project, I facilitated over a dozen workshops for dancers and non-dancers to explore ideas about illness and therapeutics by improvising movement. Each workshop featured a different "score" for movement, which I wrote based on passages from historical texts of medicine. My facilitation style was shaped by bringing together methods from contact improvisation and disability dance. This practice has changed the questions I bring to, and the ways I understand, history.



Shireen Hamza