Salomé 8 The Head

Situated at the intersection of drag, ritual, and political witnessing, this research reclaims Salomé from Orientalist fantasy by queering her as a subject entangled in power, desire, and erasure.

Salomé 8 The Head unfolds as both a translation of Oscar Wilde’s original 1892 text and a critical reflection on ritual, particularly the moments when violence is aestheticized in public life. The research investigates the thresholds between gendered bodies as contested sites, collective trauma, and the performative logics through which contemporary spectatorship encounters atrocity.

When does violence become digestible? When does it provoke action? When does it disappear behind the veil of cultural production? Are the prophets dead, or do they now speak through other mouths?

Michael(a) Daoud is an interdisciplinary artist working across visual arts, drag, performance, dance, and choreography within time-based and conceptual art. Raised in Egypt, trained in Art and Architecture in Syria and they have been based in Berlin since 2015. Their approach merges text, body, time and space as core mediums to examines historical, mythological, and social narratives.
www.MichaelDaoud.net