THE CITY’S SKY HAS COLLAPSED INTO BLOOD-STAINED CLOUDS
Performance in collaboration with Sanjid Mahmud and Karina Efendi
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, 2026
Duration: 10 minutes
Poetry within the performance by Sanjid Mahmud.
Aria: Dido’s Lament (When I am laid) by Henry Purcell; performed by Karina Efendi.
Photo Courtesy: Loreen Schmid, Joanna Pianka, Seoyeong Ma
To those who fight and resist, to the dead and the living, to the weakened and empowered.
The City’s Sky Has Collapsed Into Blood-Stained Clouds unfolds as a performative environment of a bodily imagined cityscape. Through movement, sound, and singing, the work articulates a political statement on contemporary existence marked by violence, instability, and structural inequality. The war(s), injustice, disease, and the persistent invocation of “democracy” and “freedom” mince life into a salad of countless wounded days.
The performative language draws on Butoh, developed in postwar Japan in 1959 by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Often described as the dance of darkness, Butoh foregrounds disabled, suffering, and deceased bodies.
In response to this, the work examines states of care and fear, endurance and resistance, asking how one continues to exist when the future becomes uncertain.
