"I am more interested in how a personal experience can open up a much broader question: when does support become dependence? How much freedom can exist within a structure? What happens when we resist it, or when we can no longer maintain control?"

In Karen Barad's book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), the theoretical physicist and feminist philosopher investigates agential realism to argue that the basic unit of reality is not things (objects, subjects, and bodies) but phenomena. Phenomena are an entangled collection of components, such as material, body, and apparatus, that do not pre-exist but emerge through interaction. Within this idea, matter is not passive, and meaning arises through material‑discursive practices that co-constitute both what exists and how it becomes intelligible. In the project Becoming Image, London-based interdisciplinary visual and performance artist Maria Saukhina manifests a similar alignment with this ontology. Through her various works, the artist constructs situations in which body, aerial fabric, gravity, tension, and technical apparatuses (camera, canvas, and rigging) interact to co-produce sensation, trace, and image. Rather than treating performance as a pre-composed action later documented, it becomes more a generative phenomenon in which control, dependence, and resistance are not metaphors but physical relations represented through the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies.

Becoming Image is a collection of interconnected works originating from a performance with lengths of aerial fabric suspended from the ceiling, in which the artist investigates the body as a material presence, where it not only represents an idea but is also a real physical entity, experiencing tangible conditions of control, tension, and restriction. The artist’s early connection with aerial arts shaped her relationship with the body, fabric, gravity, and physical tension, which became the first stage of this long project. Drawing from her experience, the project investigates structures that simultaneously enable and constrain, creating a contradiction of support and dependence. This concept can also be viewed through the idea of vital assemblage in Jane Bennett's work, where the effect of the suspended aerial fabric emerges from their entanglement with the body, fabric, gravity, and space rather than a single element. Here, the fabric is not a neutral object but rather an actant endowed with thing-power, meaning it supports the body’s weight and enables both ascent and descent, yet it is also restrictive and tightens, at times even limiting in ways beyond the performer’s intention, revealing the material capacity to act and exceed human design. Within this configuration, agency is distributed and underpins the work’s contradictory effects: the same material that holds can also bind, simultaneously producing sensations of security and apprehension, beauty and discomfort. The unpredictable responses of the fabric create tangible ambivalent systems, thus questioning the stages of dependence not as a purely psychological state but as a material condition of the assemblage, where support and restriction co-constitute one another and the body’s agency is always already entangled with the vibrant materialities that carry, limit, and shape its movement.

"In aerial practice, you are constantly working towards control. You control your body, the fabric, tension, movement and the possibility of falling. But as I was developing Becoming Image, I became interested in reversing that relationship. I began asking what would happen if I stopped treating the fabric simply as a tool and allowed gravity, tension, resistance and instability to participate in determining the outcome." The artist explains.

The physical encounter between the body, fabric, and space is translated into a multimedia framework; you can experience the physical practice through distinct temporal and material angles. Through long-exposure photography, the artist documents the body’s accumulating movements over time into a continuous visual trace. This allows for visible physical dynamics that the human eye could not otherwise perceive. This medium, mimicking the idea described above, captures the body, or bodily movement, and its unpredictability is acknowledged and transformed into a photographic trace. The long-exposure photographs and close-up images of the skin render visible the invisible dynamics of effort, duration, and pressure that structured the lived experience, translating the pre‑reflective kinesthesia of the performance into a "visible to the second power."*

A further layer emerges through the direct imprint and traces left in the body, which function as an immediate consequence of physical action; the image is created by the contact itself. These traces can take the form of contact marks, material alterations, or physical evidence left behind by actions. While the performance unfolds in real time, the photographic image and the residual mark on the body give space to what Merleau‑Ponty would call the flesh of the encounter: a space where acting and being acted upon, sensing and being sensed, are intertwined, like two faces of the same coin. The fabric used can be seen as the artist’s body schema, functioning less as an external entirety and more as an extension of the artist’s perceptual and motor capabilities, representing the sense of space, weight, and possibility. The redness, indentation, and temporary scars literalize Merleau‑Ponty's notion of chiasm, the concept that the body that is touched and pulled is also touched and marked, exposing the reversibility at the heart of embodiment and making tangible the cost and memory of the negotiation with gravity and support.

The final two interpretations of the work are the moving image pieces and the painting and objects that emerge from the performance. The moving image works, different from the two previous mediums, rely on duration and repetition to let us into the temporal rhythm of the body, where we witness the constant negotiation with gravity. The video preserves the process’s evolution. The painting and object embody a more final tonality; the fabric is embedded in the canvas, stretched, or knotted, pulling against a surface, presenting the body as further abstraction. They distill the encounter to where the human figure may recede or disappear completely, yet the tension, pressures, and engagements remain, as "carnal essence" of the original performance. In these stages of the project, the material acquires a presence of its own, asking whether the viewer can perceive the body even if it is no longer present.

Through all the frameworks and investigations of this project, Saukhina relinquishes some control of the outcomes, giving agency to the material resistance to actively develop the final artworks. Becoming Image is not a finished project but ongoing research into how the body can disappear, leaving behind only its traces, transitions, and material deformations. Moving forward, we can expect to continue to see photographs, moving images, paintings, and objects as part of the investigation rather than mere documentation, yet the artist will be focusing her attention on questions of nature and the environment, expanding the work’s concerns with interdependence from the individual and systems to the human and the broader natural world.

*Applies Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological terms - “visible to the second power" and "pre-reflective kinesthesia"- to Saukhina's imagery, rather than quoting the artist directly.

Know more about the artist here.

Cover image:

Tension Remains (2026). Fabric, canvas, 71 × 114 cm.

All images courtesy of the artist.