2025
Sara Jajou (creative direction, performance, video and sound editing, installation, zills), Benjamin Afif (drums, lighting and filming), Emad Jajou (keyboard), Jackson Elhage (music production and arrangement, lighting, filming), Ash Dor-Shiffer (lighting and filming). Special thanks to Ana Rojas and Daniel Franceschini-Gunn.
Single channel video
3min 54sec
Sara Jajou, Vanishing Act (2025), 3min 54sec, single channel video.
Sara Jajou, Vanishing Act (2025), 3min 54sec, single channel video.
Sara Jajou, Vanishing Act (2025), 3min 54sec, single channel video.
In the words of Daniel Neugebauer in Counter Readings of the Body, ‘the gaze…appears as an adversary, a knife, the evil eye…’. I conceptualised this work while thinking about the way the Western gaze reads and marks bodies like mine as savage, sexual, racial, animalistic, queer, grotesque, Oriental and ultimately dangerous. In order to fuel its own imperial male ego, the Western gaze renders the feminine ‘Middle Eastern’ body into a site of imagination. Only when she is flattened can the West enact both its sexualised fantasy of exposure and imagined fear of the unknown Other. Hidden from the gaze, she must be exposed. Only then can the West enact its ultimate fantasy - domination.
In Vanishing Act (2025), the performer shifts between visibility and darkness, displacing the gaze's power to locate her. The sea then becomes a transient space of a transformative quality, whereby fixed elements can become dislodged by postcolonial negotiation and translation. (Bhabha 1994). The performer, who spends much of the dance between the tide and sand, finally enters the water. In this way, the shore can be read to be representative of borders and boundaries. The ocean as a liminal zone, of encounter and flux, is perhaps what Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi (1999:45) refers to when she speaks of the ‘opportunity to express many different selves’ when belly dancers situate themselves in their political contexts. Rather than emulating Orientalist characters which fix the Other under a gaze, the ocean reminds us of the multitude of subjectivities possible outside of binaries.
This work formed the conceptual and technical foundation for my graduate work, Apparitions (2025).
Sara Jajou, Vanishing Act (2025), 3min 54sec, single channel video.
Bhabha H (1994) The location of culture, Routledge, London.
Al-Rawi (1997) Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing, Interink Books, Massachusetts.