NO NAME (2020)
A durational performance reflecting on self-identity and the confrontation with the self. Rooted in a visceral inquiry into inner resistance and recognition, the work takes its cue from the quote by George Gurdjieff: “Until a person is horrified by themselves, they know nothing about themselves.”
Presented at the Experimental Music Festival in Odesa, Ukraine, the performance unfolds as a concentrated, 30-minute exploration of presence, vulnerability, and inner tension. Semenkova situates her body within a charged context where sound, space, and embodied attention converge, collapsing the boundaries between performer, audience, and environment.
In NO NAME, the body becomes both subject and surface — an arena of affective experience where interpersonal and intrapsychic registers intersect. The work resists facile categorization, instead invoking a state of attentive listening to one’s own thresholds of perception and discomfort. Through minimal gestures and sustained focus, the performance gestures toward how self-recognition often emerges through confrontation with what is unknown, unnamed, or repressed.
The piece engages with themes of identity formation and psychological encounter, positing performance as a space where the artist and the audience witness shared processes of self-emergence and reflection.
Full video documentation available upon request.
MARYNA SEMENKOVA 