Omid's central research question delves into the potential of performance art for advancing social reform. Influenced by Bruguera’s ‘arte util,’ his practice aims to shift art’s role from signaling problems to proposing and implementing solutions. He does that in so-called "performance sessions"; gatherings where people, regardless of their artistic background, engage in improvised, co-created moments. In this series of performance sessions at Goethe Institute in Rotterdam, during his residency program, he collaborated with 12 artists, performers, dancers, and individuals from various backgrounds, where they immersed themselves in 8-day performance sessions, centering on narratives of oppression and diverse definitions of liberation.

 

Performing without an audience transforms the medium into a space for dialogue between the bodies through touch as much as via language. Inspired by Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed", these sessions prioritized the quality of participant exchange, collectively delving into experiencing ‘the experience.’ Resembling rehearsal sessions, they differed in the objective: not to create a specific form, gesture, or story, but to rehearse to feel, to dare, and to perform without the fear of doing something wrong. The focus was on liberation through unrestricted improvisation, rejecting the constraints of predefined images or characters. “There is no script for social and cultural life,” anthropologists Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (2007, p.1) wrote on the role that spontaneous acts of creativity might play in shaping notions of community and fostering new forms of social organization. The underlying idea is that improvised performances challenge assumptions ingrained in dominant knowledge systems. 

 

Here is the list of collaborators: Gab Branco, Claudia Ferrando, Daria Pugachova, Qiyun Zheng, Hosein Danesh, Rebecca Levy, Rojin Tavassoli, Peyman, Kim Zieschang, Vanessa Schaller, Julia Nielsen, Hana Kozma.