The Modern Body platform invites you to a new event: a MODERN BODY VORTEX that explores the theme beyond despair.
Curatorial Statement
In response to the social, political, and cultural turbulence of our times, we create a Vortex: An intermedia evening & night of subversive and visceral art/music performances that un-whirls and resets our inner worlds.
When so many feel crushed by the weight of a reality spiraling beyond our control, the Modern Body Vortex carves paths through the noise, cynicism, and burnout.
The event presents art that acts as a tool of empowerment.
Art that amplifies our agency.
Art that has crawled into the mud with us.
Empathic art that acknowledges pain, suffering, and hopelessness, to then manifest meaningful ways on how to ask for a helping hand, or how to be the helping hand.
The Vortex is an open dialogue; in signature Modern Body fashion, it crosses disciplines and genres.
The Modern Body Vortex begins with a free evening of short performances. A diverse group of local, national, and international artists explores the theme beyond despair on the ground floor of The Grey Space from 19:00 to 22:00: Halfie + the0ther (Anushka Chkheidze & Jonathan Bonny), Diane Mahín and Michelle Samba.
The Modern Body Vortex continues, from 22:00 to 02:00, as a collective catharsis into the night. Invited curator Rachwill Breidel (OGRI METI & koiri) curates a club program in the basement that unites the audience in a shared experience beyond despair. Featuring: Zohar, World Experience Center, and Daddy Long Dick.
The following evening, a number of invited artists enter the Modern Body Vortex to discuss together on the theme beyond despair. The discussion will be broadcast as a live podcast – stay tuned for a link!
MODERN BODY VORTEX: beyond despair
Performance event
Date & Time
13 March 2026
19:00 – 22:00 | Performances (free)
22:00 – 02:00 | Club (ticketed)
14 March 2026
19:00-22:00 | Artists conversation podcast
Tickets
Free entrance for the performance event
Club tickets available here and at the door | €9,50
Venue
The Grey Space in the Middle
Paviljoensgracht 20
2512 BP Den Haag
“If we can’t articulate more viable futures, and adapt, our human future is pretty hopeless.”
adrienne maree brown
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
TIMETABLE
Evening performances | 13 March 2026, 19h-22h (free)
| Article 0 by Michelle Samba | 19:00 – 19:20 |
| GRUNT by Diane Mahín | 19:30 – 19:45 |
| Halfie + the0ther (Anushka Chkheidze & Jonathan Bonny) | 20:00 – 20:35 |
| Article 0 by Michelle Samba | 20:45 – 21:05 |
| World Experience Center (live) | 21:15 – 21:35 |
| GRUNT by Diane Mahín | 21:45 – 22:00 |
Club event | 13 March 2026, 19h-22h (ticketed)
| Daddy Long Dick (dj) | 22:00 – 23:30 |
| Zohar (dj) | 23:30 – 01:00 |
| World Experience Center (live) | 01:00 – 02:00 |
Artists conversation – live podcast | 14 March 2026, 19h-22h (online)
| Artists conversing on the theme Beyond Despair Moderated by Katarina Petrović Live podcast streamed by RAAR (Rotterdam Art And Radio) | 19:00 – 22:00 |
PERFORMANCE PROGRAM | 19:00-22:00, Fri 13 March
Halfie + the0ther
world premiere
A shared search for meaning on the dancefloor, between hope and collapse.
When the news is unbearable, the climate is collapsing, and everything feels urgent. Why spend time making music?
Halfie + the0ther confront that tension head-on. In moments like these, music—and art, and even we ourselves—can feel unnecessary. And yet, we continue. Not to escape, but to feel. To search for meaning, in what we do and why we do it.
This project explores how music—especially electronic, rhythm-driven— can hold space for both despair and hope. The result is an intense 40-minute live performance rooted in co-creation, designed for club and hybrid performance spaces. The audience surrounds the duo and is free to move, drift, and physically engage with the sound. What unfolds is an organic, deeply human encounter: shared perspectives, a shared dancefloor, shared ways of coping.
This is a project about reclaiming joy as an act of resistance.
About building value through process, not just outcome.
About believing, even now, that what we do still matters.
Anushka Chkheidze: electronics
Jonathan Bonny: percussion, vocals
Anushka Chkheidze is a Georgian composer and sound artist whose work explores the emotional and structural intersections of electronic and acoustic music. Growing up in the village of Kharagauli, she began singing in a choir at age 11 — an experience that continues to shape her sound. Her first tracks appeared in 2019, followed by her debut album Halfie (2020). Subsequent releases include Move 20-21 (2021), reflecting pandemic isolation; Lost Luggage(2023), exploring displacement and memory; and Clean, Clear and White (2024), created with field, piano, and choir recordings in Basel, Switzerland. Her composition Intricate Pipes (2025), commissioned by the Monheim Triennale and the Gaudeamus Festival, merges polyphonic counterpoints, intricate arpeggios, and precisely timed delays, bridging acoustic resonance and electronic structure.
Anushka also collaborates closely with Berlin-based sound artist Robert Lippok.
Jonathan Bonny (he/they) is multi-instrumentalist, composer and theater maker. He studied classical percussion in Ghent, Helsinki, and The Hague and feels most at home in the interdisciplinary performing arts. Jonathan’s work seeks a more socially just world and blends influences from the classical music tradition with pop and electronic music. Jonathan is music design lecturer in the Music & Technology department at the HKU and has been invited as guest teacher for projects at ArtEZ, Fontys and Codarts. Jonathan performed with HIIIT, Het muziek, Blindman[Drums], KLANG, Club Guy&Roni and Orkater. Compositions by Jonathan have been played by Spectra, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Casco Phil, B’rock and DeCompagnie. Jonathan composed music for Silbersee, Theater Sonnevanck, Boost Producties, PeerGroup, MoON Productions, LIKEMINDS, Frascati, Dunja Jocic and Theater Transparant.
GRUNT by Diane Mahín
In GRUNT, the audience meets a woman who communicates solely through growling. This growler navigates various moods, portraying what seems to be an urgent story to be told or an intimate conversation to be held. While she attempts to tell a joke, the audience is met with dark growls, turning humor into a shadowy reflection. When she reaches out tenderly, all she can express is violence.
What begins as an awkward encounter full of innocent misunderstandings gradually escalates into a desperate need for connection. As she fails to bridge the communication gap with the audience, her growls become more frantic. She propels them into space, seeking some kind of response. The vocalizations transform from deliberate attempts to communicate into involuntary, visceral outbursts, culminating in a violent expulsion of sound.
Inspired by the extreme vocals of Death Metal, Diane Mahín started growling two years ago. In GRUNT, she uses growling to explore the effects of violence through the visceral language of voice and body. The performance channels a woman’s voice caught between composure and eruption, civility and fury. Within these growls, hidden layers emerge, revealing a raw, direct, and unfiltered expression of inner turmoil.
CREDITS
concept, performance: Diane Mahín
costume design: Miruna Vlad
artistic advice: Isadora Tomasi
vocal coaching: Monica Janssen, Cheyenne Vankan
residency: GREENHOUSE, Mime Fabriek
special thanks: Rose Akras
supported by: Amarte Fonds
Diane Mahín is a Dutch-Iranian performance maker. She makes performative worlds in which sound and image are the driving forces. Diane scrutinizes the human body as a material object in order to dissect social constructions. A single sound from the body opens up an entire world. She follows it, digs in, tears it up, and rebuilds it into theatrical codes shaped by the learned behaviors of an unbearable society. She creates space for the ugliness and darkness of daily life without softening it, sometimes provoking laughter you did not see coming. After her studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, and Sandberg Institute, her works have been shown in visual arts, theater, and new music contexts both nationally and internationally.
ARTICLE 0 by Michelle Samba
world premiere
Ask for a hand
Every arrangement between people has already made its first decision before anyone has walked through the door, settled into position, or understood what they were agreeing to by simply remaining in the room, and what accumulates over the course of an evening is not understanding exactly but something closer to residue, the kind that forms when weight has passed repeatedly through the same set of gestures until the gestures themselves begin to carry the weight, until the hand that moves across the table is no longer only a hand but a function, a threshold, a temporary office of something that has not yet been given its correct name and perhaps should not be, since naming it would only flatter it with a precision it does not deserve and has not earned, whereas what happens when ink meets paper under particular conditions of request and response, of offering and delay, of staying and leaving, is not a representation of anything outside itself, no, it’s an event with its own internal pressure, its own economy, its own quiet and non negotiable claim on whoever is still present when the pile has grown large enough to mean something.
Michelle Samba (b. 1990, Friesland/Congo) builds multi-year series in which the materials are chosen because they already carry the weight of the work before the work begins: blood that has a finite supply, paper that an institution has already processed and discarded once. In I, Hereby, developed through the Marina Abramović Institute’s residency in the Joseph Beuys archive at Museum Schloss Moyland, she stamped that deaccessioned paper with ink made from her own blood for six days, seven hours each, without intermission. The pile that formed is still accumulating meaning.
CLUB PROGRAM | 22:00-02:00, Fri 13 March
Curated by Rachwill Breidel (OGRI METI & koiri)
Zohar
Cutting-edge sonics as the shifting of storms. Percussive and pulsating, Zohar is known for a razor-sharp and highly dynamic club-signature.
With years of formative experience controlling dancefloors, the artist behind Zohar has been treading a diverse and eclectic musical path in which rattling low-end and rhythmic tension can be regarded as the common denominators. Known for technical refinement and mixing witchcraft, Zohar now intuitively seeks innovative and surprising connections, both disorienting and exciting listeners in the process.
The artist’s sparse yet prolific output as a producer is best channeled through the illustrious ZHR label. Quickly becoming a mainstay in the vital Dutch scene, Zohar has recently featured at renowned institutions such as Dekmantel Festival and FIBER Festival as well as making international appearances at Positive Education (2022) and the Opera House (2022, 2018). The latter took place in collaboration with dance performer Hannah Grennel (formerly involved with the Royal Ballet UK).
World Experience Center (live)
Daddy Long Dick
Live podcast : Beyond despair | 19:00 – 22:00, Sat 14 March
We close this Modern Body Vortex with an extended conversation with a group of invited artists around the theme. Together we exchange ideas and discuss possible methodologies, philosophies, and approaches to take us beyond despair.
The conversation will not be physically open to the public, but will be streamed live by RAAR (Rotterdam Art And Radio). It will also be archived for the future.
A link will be added here closer to the event.
Artists in conversation: Diane Mahín, Jonathan Bonny, Kristin Norderval, Michelle Samba, Stelios Manousakis, Stephanie Pan
Moderator: Katarina Petrović
![Stelios Manousakis – Act so that ther is no use in a center [Vienna2014] – visitor_1920px](https://modernbodyfestival.org/now/wp-content/uploads/Stelios-Manousakis-Act-so-that-ther-is-no-use-in-a-center-Vienna2014-visitor_1920px.jpg)
