Our Judgement as Performance Art

As humans, we judge ourselves, others, and unknown cultures. Judging is an attribute of being human. It is an impulse that is almost uncontrollable, and the trait that artist, Sarah Trouche, anthropomorphizes in her performance art – she breaths a persona into various forms of human judgement and acts it out.

For instance, in the work below, Trouche joins a nomad community in the Sahara desert and devices three performance artworks to showcase the nomadic group’s struggle and cultural fragility in the face of a rapidly changing world that has left them behind. She wears a cheche (their traditional headscarf) and is painted head-to-toe in indigo, the color of their linen clothes.

In the artwork above, she stacks and watches miniature blue mosques fall, presenting the “the frailty of religious ideology”.

In the artwork below, she shows alternative lifestyle modes and different choices of habitat by using her veil to create a tent.

In the last performance artwork, she instructs a car to speed circles around her to create an artificial storm presenting the landscape that has molded the Saharan nomad community.

Her artworks present the psychological lifestyle of the “other” and how the world pushes conflicting belief systems and scrutiny onto outside cultures.

Contribution by Creative Maker, Ashlyn Booth