مِيكَائِيْل(ةْ) دَاوُودْ | Michael(a) Daoud:
Michael(a) Daoud is an interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher working in the expanded field of time-based art. Their practice treats time as a primary medium: stretching, repeating, suspending and choreographing it through durational structures, recurrence and cyclical formats. Duration in their work is not only a method but a material: a way of producing knowledge through embodied experience.
Raised in Egypt and trained in Art and Architecture in Syria, Daoud has been based in Berlin since 2015. They hold an M.A. in Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) from the University of the Arts Berlin (HZT-UdK). Their work operates at the intersection of visual and performance art, situating the body simultaneously as a site of research and as a visual, sculptural element within space. Through long-form performances, archival interventions and spatial installations, they explore how time accumulates in bodies, landscapes and political structures.
Central to their recent work is The Insisting Body, a durational research project unfolding across Berlin sites marked by histories of violence. Structured through cyclical temporal frameworks and repetitive embodied presence, the project examines witnessing, care, and refusal within public space. The work expands into installation, mapping practices, embroidered garments, and a book publication that documents the process as both artistic and theoretical inquiry.
Daoud’s first published book extends this research into print form, bringing together performance documentation, archival materials and critical reflection. The publication functions not as retrospective documentation but as an extension of the practice itself, treating the book as a temporal and choreographic space.
Working through practice-as-research, Daoud investigates migration, exile and collective memory not as singular events but as durational conditions. Mythological and archival narratives are reactivated through embodied repetition, where personal histories intersect with broader imaginaries of displacement. Rather than illustrating theory, their performances generate it; proposing choreographic structures as forms of temporal inquiry.
Originally trained as an architect and plastic artist, Daoud shifted from constructing buildings to inhabiting space through movement, using the body to interrupt linear time and produce layered temporalities. Objects, atmospheres and gestures are composed into choreographed environments in which fiction and documentary, presence and memory, collapse into one another.
Their work has been presented in Berlin and internationally, including at Haus der Statistik, CoCulture, Schwules Museum, Berlin Aids-Hilfe, UdK Rundgang, English Theatre Berlin’s EXPO Festival, Performing Arts Festival Berlin (PAF), Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre, Perugia International Journalism Festival, Oslo World Festival, STAMP Festival (Hamburg), and the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), among others.