1 Jul - 31 Aug 2026

Owa Mesa

After living in Berlin for a year, Owa Mesa has become increasingly interested in a question: how do we encounter a body before we begin to categorize it?

As an artist whose gender expression is often read as ambiguous, Mesa has repeatedly experienced how strangers project assumptions, desire, fear, curiosity, or political meanings onto the body before any real encounter can happen. Living within Berlin's queer communities has further opened questions about what connection actually means. Is it built through shared identities, or through something more fundamental?

During this residency, Mesa approaches these questions through the body itself. Drawing from meditation, performance, and everyday bodily experience, the residency explores how people might remain present with a body before judging or defining it. Rather than seeking fixed identities, the project asks how attention, perception, and embodied experience can become forms of coexistence.

Throughout the residency, Mesa will develop a series of participatory public actions and shared bodily practices that investigate intimacy, trust, and the possibility of community beyond predefined social categories. Some of these works may involve ordinary bodily functions as artistic material.