Video Performance 2022

In “Wax Alive” (2022) Ekici synthesizes her interest in the ancient artistry of bronze casting with a live performance that reimagines the notions of materiality through body and nature. Wrapped in a plastic dress covered in wax, Ekici stands on a white platform in the scorching Burkina Faso sun. She inhabits the place of a real bronze cast: under the unrelenting glare and blaze of nature she stands, the wax slowly melting from her dress. These droplets fall with stochastic effect onto the white platform, creating an abstract work. After two hours, Ekici ends the performance: her face has gained a deep red shade. She is utterly enervated by the heat and light. She leaves the platform and takes off her costume. The platform, now covered with solidified wax drops, becomes a work of art in its own right—a tribute to Jackson Pollock and his drip painting technique. Ekici first became interested in bronze casting when she learned of its techniques during her residency scholarship at the Opera Village in Burkina Faso. Inspired by the nearby Laongo sculpture park where sculptors create bronze sculptures using traditional methods, and elemental processes like fire and metal, Ekici decidedly embarks on her own artistic interpretation. This style of crafting bronze sculptures uses a wax form that is embedded in clay (a mixture of sand and donkey excrement). This creates a negative mold in which the metal is poured—by melting the wax, but not the metal, the artists can effectively construct a mold for the sculpture. Wax, a material that liquifies under heat and can be reshaped endlessly, offers a poetic parallel to the cycles of transformation that define both nature and the human body. It is a material always on the edge of change, always becoming something else. In Ekici’s hands, it becomes a prescient reminder of our regenerative beauty and our intrinsic impermanence. While developing a bronze figure through this process, Ekici noticed something unexpectedly powerful: when she coated a simple plastic bag in wax, its creases resulted in folds and textures of wax reminiscent of flowing fabric—fragile yet sculptural. Though artificial, the waxed form retains a distinctly human feel; its broken and fragmented distribution over the plastic surrounds Ekici’s body as if a second skin. In many ways, this artificial material becomes an existential dialogue for the human body’s own survival and evanescence. Wax Alive emerges as both an ephemeral performance and a meditation on transience. As Ekici steps into the harsh midday sun wearing the wax-coated plastic costume, the material begins to melt, sag, and reshape itself in real time. The melting is not simply a collapse but a transformation—a return to fluidity, to the fundamental randomness of birth, life, and the universe. To this end, the Jackson Pollock-esque dripped wax highlights the porous boundary between form and formlessness, stability and decay, life and death. This power does not stand alone. The wax relies on the sun for its reinvention, to remake the art into a flexible self. Nature, here, is not merely a backdrop—it is a co-creator. The sun's heat is a sculpting hand, and the body is its temporary vessel for transformation. Ekici’s performance does not resist decay; instead, it honors it as part of a larger universal rhythm. “Wax Alive” reminds us that everything—identity, memory, form—is ultimately subject to change, and that there is a strange beauty in letting go of permanence. In surrendering to melting, to time and nature that is, we are invited to reconsider what it means to be alive: not in resistance to the world, but in graceful harmony with its ephemeral, ever-shifting. (Text: Jono Wang Chu)

Wax, black plastic costume, camera

Video Duration: 6:28min

Camera and photos: Farouck Quedraogo, Amado Quedraogo Video editing: Nezaket Ekici Assistant: Salfo Nacoulma Location: Opera Village Africa, Burkina Faso Thanks to: Opera Village Africa, Burkina Faso; Laongo Sculpture Park