Two-channel video installation (17:32) by Edith Saldanha, 2024, New York
from 04/10/2025, Foyer Schauspielhaus, first european presentation in parallel with DE SINGEL, Antwerp
‘Skin.Bodies I’ lasts 17 minutes and is shown exclusively to 2 or 4 viewers at a time.
ALL DATES
SKIN.BODIES I by Edith Saldanha is the first chapter of a triptych exploring institutional violence and its impact on the body. The work approaches the body as material – an object shaped, disciplined, and formed by institutional pressures. At the center is the skin: a boundary between inside and outside, a uniquely individual document, and simultaneously a projection surface for societal power structures. Across nine scenes, the two-channel video traces the marks that structural inequalities leave on bodies, unfolding a narrative of self-reflection, assimilation, emancipation, and ultimately, transformation. The skin becomes fluid, freeing itself from social attributions, thus opening a space for reflection beyond structural systems of inequality.
Saldanha examines the skin as a multidimensional and political space: as a surface on which violence is visible, as an individual and collective archive, and as a site of transformation. The use of varied materials, textures, and colors creates an interplay between psychological states and physical presence.
The skin is positioned in relation to societal power structures, based on a fundamental paradox: institutions generate inequality through hierarchies while simultaneously demanding conformity of language, posture, attitude or taste. For marginalized bodies, this adaptation becomes both a survival strategy and a promise of social mobility. These bodies are caught between two false promises: the imperative to conform to dominant norms, and the instrumentalization of otherness as a form of value. Rather than proposing transformation within existing structures, SKIN.BODIES I invites us to reimagine the body beyond these violent frameworks.
Edith Saldanha lives and works in Berlin. Their interdisciplinary practice combines acting, performance, video, and research-based visual art. Theoretical references for SKIN.BODIES I include Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. The project was developed during a research residency in New York. The stay in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically Black working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, and research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem were pivotal to the development of the work.
Skin.Bodies I was made with support from the Goethe-Institut München, Kulturfonds Stadt München and Stadt Salzburg.
Filmstills © Ilina Bhatia
