Hailed as a “strange creature that pushes the boundaries of body movement and defines new spaces of non- verbal theater” (Irfan Hošić, art historian), mersiha messiha aka Mesihović  is a trans- disciplinary  artist born in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Out of her engagement in the arts, science, politics and interest in renewal through the collision of the three, a nomadic platform,  CIRCUITDEBRIS is born in 2011. CIRCUITDEBRIS is dedicated to conceptualizing her collaboration across disciplines and her passion for research oriented praxis.

Since 2011, messiha has developed her own body-in-motion methodology by searching for a movement language that could express war and destruction she experienced as a young kid expelled from her home in Ex- Yugoslavia in 1993, as well as the ease she could not find in her movement expression in formal dance training and then went on to teach at  schools such as the Juilliard School in New York, Princeton University in New Jersey, Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South africa among other. 

In addition to dance, messiha incorporates elements of theater, visual arts, literature, sound and ethnography into her work. She places human behavior and the endless possibilities of the body as an observation of the perception of the possible and  utilizes improvisation, immediacy  and radical imagination as primary means of communication. 

Her research explores the construct of artistic affiliation and  deepens the interconnectedness of the moving body and sound in relation to tradition and culture, spatializing modalities in performance that rupture the binary of mind/body, nature/culture, spirit/material and dismantle oppressive structures and hegemonic thought, setting emergent fame- work for questions related to corporeality.  

messiha´s inquiry has been centered around Nationalism as a political, social, and economic ideology, the relationship of our Colonial past and the Neocolonial Present, the negation of  lives which do not operate under a legal value system and the importance of radical imagination  as means of redress, reparation. A synthesis of being deeply steeped in the classical ballet tradition, improvisational techniques, the biomechanics of the human body, with the vocabulary of displacement and non-fixity of identity found in diasporic cultures, the trans-national position of her birth land Bosnia and Herzegovina, and her experience as a refugee give birth to her movement language, approach to scoring sound  and her ability to facilitate transgressive community spaces. 

messiha holds a BFA in Dance from California Institute of the Arts,  an MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, (An interdisciplinary field developed at the intersection of oral interpretation, literary adaptation, theater, anthropology, aesthetic theory and speech-act theory, performance studies explores the roles performance and performativity play in the constitution of social realities including race, sexuality, gender, nation, and ability, drawing heavily upon the traditions of black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory and feminist theory, while learning a range of methods for approaching performance, including performance ethnography, archival inquiry, and performance theory), and an MFA in Dance from University of the Arts, Philadelphia PA.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am  interested in the subterranean, presenting the human somatic and visceral experience in the context of the society we live in and our relationship to the world at large through looking closely at the connections, rhythms and energy that exist within our moving bodies.

Through juxtaposition, fragmentation of what is familiar (the normative rhythms, recognizable imagery) and less familiar (non-normative impulses), in the stories told by our bodies, I pose questions related to freedom and what is accepted as normal in our society.

Through examining the body, the energy that exists within it and connects us to everything else on earth, I can strip away the phantom images we have created of our reality, finding answers to what freedom truly means.

When we realize everything is energy, just all in different states and forms, that all structures can be re-imagined and its walls shifted, that is when we realize change is possible; the current system in place can be re-organized. It can be more fluid.

Hierarchical power structures can be re-arranged. Our system can be just and based on a just exchange of energy where everyone participates and holds stakes. Nothing is, everything moves and shifts and we all hold power to what direction.