London, UK · 2026
Becoming
Image
Becoming Image, 2026
Performance · Moving Image · Photography · Material Installation
London, UK
Becoming Image is an interdisciplinary body of work exploring the relationship between the body, material and systems of support.
Becoming Image begins with a physical encounter between the body and suspended aerial fabric. The material holds and elevates the body, but the support it offers gradually becomes constraint, dependency and entanglement. As movement becomes less controllable, the body loses its stable outline: it blurs, multiplies and is absorbed into fabric and light. The fall becomes both an exit from the supporting system and a method of image-making, transferring weight and impact into photographs, moving image, ink drops and material traces.
The body becomes an image only when it loses control.
Performance imageThe body is no longer presented as a stable figure. It is absorbed into fabric, movement and light.
Body / Material
The System
Aerial fabric functions both as support and as a structural system. It holds the body, carries its weight and makes movement beyond the ground possible. Yet the body can rise only through continued contact with the structure that sustains it.
Photographic work
Loss of Form
Long-exposure photography registers instability as a transformation of form. The body multiplies, blurs and partially disappears, leaving accumulated traces of movement rather than a single fixed image.
Body / Material
Resistance / Entanglement
As the body attempts to move within and against the structure, support becomes entanglement. Resistance does not release the body from the system; it draws the body further into it.
Action / Residue
Fall / Trace
The fall is also a method of image-making. Weight, impact and movement alter the surface below. What remains is not a depiction of the body, but a material record of contact.
Moving image
Becoming Image — Film
Single-channel video, 2 min 55 sec
Material works
The Tension Remains
The physical logic of Becoming Image extends beyond the performance into painting and object-making. Fabric, tension, pressure and impact move from the performing body into material form. The works do not illustrate the action; they carry its conditions forward.
Tension remains embedded in the surface after the performing body is absent. Fabric acts as structure, pressure and material memory.
Fabric passes through and around the canvas, making support reciprocal and uncertain: the structure holds the material while also being bound by it.
With the body removed, fabric persists as a residual structure—an object carrying the conditions of suspension and dependency.
Falling ink transfers action into mark. Gravity becomes a method of drawing rather than a subject represented by the image.
A second study records the variation and unpredictability of descent, impact and dispersal across the paper.
Produced through the fall, the work retains an incomplete material record of contact. It is a trace of the body rather than its depiction.
Project details
Performance & conceptMaria Saukhina
LocationNational Centre for Circus Arts, Creation Studio, London, UK
Performance / documentation session23 May 2026
PhotographyKate Kantur
VideographyOlga Lagun
Single-channel video2:55 min