Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Murat Adash is a German-Turkish visual artist and researcher. Engaged in an expanded choreographic practice, Adash develops works across a range of media and formats encompassing performance, moving image, installation, and writing. Preoccupied with the phenomenon of camouflage, Adash employs dance and movement as spatio-temporal and boundary-crossing techniques to rehearse other ways of being-in-the-world. Beyond the notion of animal mimicry, Adash develops an ongoing choreographic research body on camouflage through a queer lens to explore questions of alterity, agency, subjectivity, and visibility.

Adash explores the multifaceted phenomenon of camouflage through an ongoing series entitled Correspondance—a play on words conjoining “correspondence” (in the sense of resemblance; resonance) and “dance”. The series develops multi-media, choreographic inquiries that probe the malleability of boundaries—both between bodies and environs, human and non-human, tangible and intangible, elemental and material bodies, as well as bodies of knowledge, and their possibilities for crisscrossing across intra-bodily registers. The Correspondance series seeks to investigate the dynamic and animate relationalities at play in choreographic situations and spatial contexts in order to interrogate new possibilities for configuring our bodies otherwise.

While at Headlands

During my residency, I will continue developing my ongoing artistic research on camouflage in dialogue with bodies of knowledge from a trans-disciplinary web of fields, including ecology, zoology, anthropology, philosophy, queer and feminist theory, performance studies, and indigenous cosmologies. I reconfigure camouflage as both a performance strategy and conceptual framework to probe other ways of being-in-space, as well as explore questions of embodiment and environment, mimicry and alterity, visibility and invisibility, and moving with and across a much wider, animate sociality through my multi-media, choreographic practice. Given that camouflage also remains an intriguing trivia question of military history and that Headlands is located within former army barracks in the Marin Headlands, I will conduct both theoretical and movement-based research through ecological dance practice to rehearse the multiple ways that camouflage can spark new realities that are inherently changeable— enabling another kind of “here-ness” where bodies become Other and reproduce altered corpo-realities with a difference.