Dafna Maimon
The musical video work Homebody examines the relationship between consciousness, the human body and the home. Filmed in Villa Skeppet, the smallest private home designed by Alvar Aalto, the “home-bodies” are four performers who move between individual presence and a shared collective entity. Their daily desires, frustrations, and intimacies unfold through surreal yet tender musical acts. Utilizing ASOCS (Authentic Stream-of-Consciousness Singing) a somatic method developed by the artist, the work gives voice to the body’s wisdom and helps uncover buried truths about the self that are equally moving and irrational. The work simultaneously unsettles the posture and serenity of its backdrop, Aalto’s modernist architectural icon, by revealing the irrationality of the human thought residing within it.
Homebody is a synchronized, 45-minute three-channel video loop, with each screen showing different rooms and views of the home in apparent real time. Performers move between the three screens, creating the impression of crossing the house and multiple realities simultaneously. The installation offers a magnified view of domestic life where little happens until creativity organically emerges, erupting into song; visitors, both wanted and uninvited, transform the household; and minor gestures ripple through the entire system.
Homebody is a synchronized, 45-minute three-channel video loop, with each screen showing different rooms and views of the home in apparent real time. Performers move between the three screens, creating the impression of crossing the house and multiple realities simultaneously. The installation offers a magnified view of domestic life where little happens until creativity organically emerges, erupting into song; visitors, both wanted and uninvited, transform the household; and minor gestures ripple through the entire system.
Leaky Teeth explores the retrieval of bodily intelligence as a key to understanding our broken relationship to nature. It centers around a fictional character named June and a cavity in her wisdom tooth that is home to a group of prehistoric humans. From researching paleolithic cave art, and the likely fluid relationship between these early artists and their environments, an experimental storyline rethinking physical pain was developed and set inside the main character’s wisdom tooth; a decaying papier mache cave set. In a stark contrast to the cave, June’s life is set in a luxurious, yet leaking modernist villa, the Maison Louis Carré, designed by the architect Alvar Aalto.
June’s simultaneously leaking tooth and home suggest a worldview where everything, including our bodies, is porous; we are made and remade in, and through, our relationship to the material world. There are holes everywhere; time, space and bodies leak into and sponge of one another. We are thoroughly entangled – whether we like it or not.
Bio
Dafna Maimon is a Finnish artist based in Berlin and Finland. Working across performance, video, painting, drawing, and immersive installation, her practice explores how bodily knowledge is overlooked or suppressed within contemporary society. Through constructed social situations, embodied scores, and environments conceived as living organisms, her work examines the relationships between body, psyche, and surroundings, often engaging questions of identity, belonging, abjection, and care.
Her humorous and often absurd work taps deep into the human narrative and its vessel; the human body. Ultimately, her practice is a search for new perspectives of embodied knowledge and tools, that allow for self-reflection, digestion and catharsis.
Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Kunst-Werke (Berlin), PS1 Moma (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, (Antwerp), Helsinki Biennial (Helsinki), Mahj Jewish Museum (Paris), Kim Center Contemporary Art, (Riga), 1646 (Den Haag), BOAN1942, (Seoul), Salt, (Istanbul), Center for Maine Contemporary Art, (Rockland, Maine), Nbk, Berlin, Gallery Wedding (Berlin).
Dafna Maimon. Artist
Images on this page:
Dafna Maimon, stills from Homebody (2025) and Leaky Teeth (2021)
Open House Surgery is a performance project by Dafna Maimon as part of the exhibition Embodying a Building at the Nordic House in Reykjavík. The performances took place on 8 October.
Set in a building designed by Alvar Aalto, the performance transforms an open house tour, normally a presentation of reliable facts about canonical architecture, into an interrogation of human thought and feeling. It shifts from a “rational” introduction to a designed space, toward divulging lived, sensed, mind-body experience in real time. From touching a door handle to existential crises, Open House Surgery un-dissects the body-mind-environment triad into an ever-morphing, unpredictable musical of biological self-reflection.
Lasting approximately 60 minutes, the performance features the artist alongside long-term collaborators, dancer Leah Katz and singer Jessica Gadani.
The project builds on a somatic and improvisational method, Authentic Stream of Consciousness Singing (ASOCS), developed by the artist. ASOCS allows performers to vocalize internal sensations, thoughts, and emotions in real time, transforming spontaneous expression into intimate, humorous, and affective vocal landscapes.
The performance Open House Surgery belongs to an ongoing series of works set within the buildings of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, engaging his ideas of architecture as living organisms in which body, environment, nature, and psyche form a shared field. For the artist, who grew up in Finland in an immigrant family, Aalto’s buildings also provide a setting for exploring identity, belonging, and what it means to be "inside".
Open House Surgery - a tour through, an open –– a walk through, a building, a… a supposedly simple orientation from room to room. But, as Werner Herzog said about psychoanalysis; the building becomes unliveable when its every corner is illuminated by harsh light, likewise, the building becomes deliciously alive when a body allows itself to really be absorbed by said building –to take over its sensorial faculties, hijack its nervous, limbic, endocrine, fluid, skeletal, and organ– yes, every system. Whose? The bodies’ or the buildings’? This happens everyday, to some degree, but to which? Maybe the golden angle – about 137.5°– supposedly also found in the human heart, according to some, but not all, opinions. Or how, according to one man, the infant takes its mother, its lover, its caretaker, all of the above, to be a part of itself. For a moment; a mirror, no boundaries, a shared biology. Architecture is biology, Aalto said. Aalto means wave, one that flooded his homeland with style. But, inside a wall is faced, stripped, licked, and punched. A floor repeatedly pounced; a chair, interrogated… yes, exactly, not the other way around like in Gestalt therapy, or maybe that’s a dialogue, or is it a monologue? Speaking alone to oneself, speaking, small and isolated, speaking, nonetheless, hoping to be heard.