Live Performance 2023 Presented at: Performance as part of FSA Spirituality and Art Retreat, Charleston, South Carolina (With featured paintings from the Gallery of Abbots at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Schloss Corvey, in Höxter, Germany)

In her 2023 live performance, “Fragments of Hand Gestures”, Nezaket Ekici builds on the themes of religion and spirituality she had first visited in “Handgestus” (2020) through body purity and nature. Set, this time, in the United States at the beautiful riverside of Charleston, South Carolina, Ekici continues her ritualistic handwashing, but in three distinct locations. Dressed in the exact same costume she had worn in 2020 at the performance of “Handgestus”, she undertakes a three-part nomadic journey: first at the river-side, then at the open-pasture near a monastery, and then lastly inside the chapel itself. At each station, Ekici enacts a ritual handwashing and gesture sequence—repeating the slow, deliberate movements developed in her earlier performance, and wearing the exact same brown costume she wore three years prior. Her body becomes a temporal thread stitching together distant geographies and histories, the gesture traveling intact yet transformed. This journey of movement across spaces mimics the notion of ‘pilgrimage’ that many Christian believers once had to undergo. The structure of the performance mirrors the same spiritual logic: a journey not simply of space, but of inner reckoning. At the riverside, her cleansing is opened to nature directly: the flowing river runs behind her, and the trees sweep their long branches through the wind. A sense of fluidity in her actions is seen also in the immediate nature that envelopes her physically. Similarly, her washing in the pasture highlights the open expanse of sky, evoking a kind of untouched mediation between the heavens and her. Ekici’s fascination with hands reflects their essential role in non-verbal communication, revealing inner emotions through subtle gestures—raised in anger, folded in reverence, or trembling in sorrow. These instinctive movements become a lens through which she explores the spiritual and existential dimensions of religious practice, asking what such gestures mean, to whom they are directed, and how they silently express devotion, grief, or longing. She walks through the gardens slowly and contemplatively, blurring the line between ritual and everyday motion. Within the chapel, her last washing takes on a solemn gravity—she stops for a moment after cleaning her hands, and points sternly at her hand. In that instance, all attraction is drawn towards the gestureless form: now still, the audience which sits in the chapel is invited to intimately consider the ‘hand’ not simply as an extension of her body, but as a site and place of sanctification and of purity. In the final moments, another powerful gesture takes place: Ekici projects the very medieval portraits she had first seen and studied in Schloss Corvey—where “Handgestus” was originally performed—onto the wall of the chapel. The religious iconography from one sacred site is now superimposed onto another, drawing a bridge between German and American soil, between tradition and reinterpretation. The gesture, duplicated, re-sited, becomes a transnational act—suggesting a spiritual conduit that surpasses one’s physical body, and the physical limitations of geography or human will. By situating “Fragments of Hand Gestures” near a monastery once again, Ekici subtly echoes the cloistered origins of her first performance, but expands its reach—blending ritual with nature, movement with memory, and the sacred with the fragmented. (Text By: Jono Wang Chu)

3 Tables, Projector, Costume, glass bowls, soap, 3 white towels, 3 tables with cloth

1.5 h Live Performance HD Mov 16:9 , 20:36 min colour sound

Video Supported by Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts (FSA) Edited by FSA 2023 Fellow Cloris He With Special Thanks to GladdeningLight