Stretching Toward the Unseen
Installation + Performance, 2025

In Stretching Toward the Unseen, Qinza Najm reimagines gender not as a fixed state but as an elastic architecture—collapsing, mutating, and rebuilding itself through time, ritual, and resistance. The installation comprises three large-scale unstretched oil paintings—depicting a fragmented face, a contorted torso, and a gestational form—suspended in a triangular formation. Together, they evoke both confinement and transformation.

Activated by a live performance in (un)Framing Gender, two dancers—clothed in translucent black bodysuits—move through and around the triangle. Their gestures mirror the stretched anatomies, negotiating presence, absence, vulnerability, and power. A shehnai hums through the space, invoking ceremonial memory—weddings, funerals, rites of passage—both celebratory and oppressive.

Monochrome hues of grey, black, and white underscore the ambiguity of embodiment: visibility and erasure, femininity and masculinity, sacred and profane. In this suspended geometry of bodies and brushstrokes, Najm invites viewers to confront how gendered identities are policed, stretched, and renegotiated across cultures and generations.