- watch: 27th June2020 at 3pm UTC
- duration: 20 min
Step 1: Create an Imaginary Friend Sit comfortably, close your eyes, breathe and think about what kind of a friend you would like to have.Now give him/her a shape, a face, a color, a smell. Give him/her a laugh and a voice. Finally give your friend traits such as loyalty, kindness and humour. Step 2: Set the Table for Two Tonight when you sit for dinner set the table for two then call your friend and your friend will be there with the face, the shape, the smell, the laugh and the voice that you gave him. The performance is a reflection on the present. The prevalent fear, the lack of human connection and the lost sense of time. The performance navigates between the fading past and the imagined futures.
BIO: Sobia Zaidi is a performance artist, playwright and theatre maker. Her practice is concerned with finding and curating the mundane and ordinary as extraordinary. Sobia has always been fascinated by the body both as an object in space and as a subject. The inspiration for her performances comes from the daily life interactions which she re-enacts in the most unexpected sites and contexts. For her the awareness of the body is the beginning of all the politics and it’s interaction with space is where the performance starts for her. She playfully explores the poetics of anonymity and secrecy in her practice which is why her work is mostly subtle and deliberately unnoticeable. Text is a major part of her practice. She uses text to record the memory of the work and also creates DIY manuals for performances that contain instructions to create performances. She received her Masters in Performance Art and artistic research from Utrecht School of the Arts, Netherlands and is presently the Coordinator of Visual and Performing Arts Program at Forman Christian College, Lahore. ARTIST’S WEBSITE