Stigmata

Maiada Aboud was born in Palestine and based in London for ten years now. After she finished two first degrees in criminology and arts, she has moved to the UK to finish her Master's and PhD in performance art. Maiada brings her narrative as a Palestinian independent divorced woman who lives in a western country, and the socio-political comprehensive complexities around that, all through body performance art. Ascension is a collage of inspirations by different undisputed stories taken particularly from the Bible and the religion. Starting with the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2:21), going through the narrative of “The Fall and expulsion from Eden” (Genesis 3:1), in which she was seduced to eat the forbidden fruit after a dialogue between her (the woman or Eve) and a serpent which is also described sometimes as a female, then ending by the Baptism by Blood ceremony which was a common Catholic Roman ceremony done for martyrs’ redemption and direct ascension to paradise. Different and various narratives that all commonly put the male in the center and place the female as a weaker squad, whereas these notions are still relevant and influencing the women entity inside societies till today. The artist tries to bring her aspect through refuting and rebutting the common beliefs, by using her body as tool for criticizing public social articulations. Thus with a range connecting between aesthetics and provocation, she aims to create questions for open debate around these assumptive themes.