Hullabelly

Born in 1970 in Kırşehir, Turkey, Nezaket Ekici immigrated with her family to Germany at the age of three. She studied performance with the artist Marina Abramović, concentrating on subjects such as social gender, religion and Turkish-German identity. She has presented her works and 200 performances in over 50 countries and 150 villages. Here, Ekici gives the everyday hula hoop a political twist as she spins the glittering hoop around her veiled head. Ekici alters the use of the object by restricting its performance to her neck, where it makes repeated contact with her headscarf. In doing so, Hullabelly challenges our own expectations of how an object is manipulated and of the subject who manipulates it. The initial performance was presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale. It lasted three hours, to the point where the hula hoop appeared to almost suffocate the artist. This work was part of a collective exhibition of performance installations entitled Recycling the Future, which involved the performance of repetitive actions for long periods of time, the artists using their bodies as their primary site of expression.