All welcome, pre-registration required

Through a series of interactive exercises, Aya Afaneh and Yoonsik Chico Park will introduce participants to philosophies rooted in their respective performance practices: impossibility, time, material and the body. The workshop will open a space of collision for these four elements, interrogating what the performative act is, individually and collectively. This workshop will include movement practices, play with material and collaborative performance.

This programme is preceded by an Assembly-led tour of the 2025 Youth Takeover. Participants of the workshop are encouraged to attend the tour as well to learn more about the exhibited works. Reserve your spot through the above link.

This programme is organised by the Assembly 2024-2025 member Ayesha Fernandes as part of the 2025 Youth Takeover.

Aya Afaneh is a Palestinian artist with an interdisciplinary practice spanning performance, sculpture, writing and printmaking. Her research investigates mystical and historical communication with and through time, dimension and space. Aya is an alumna of the Teaching Artist Fellowship (2024/2025), Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2023), Rewilding the Kitchen (2023), Samt (2022), and Numoo (2021). She is a graduate of NYU Abu Dhabi (2021), receiving her BA in Art and Art History and in Theater, with a minor in Creative Writing.

Yoonsik Chico Park is a Korean artist living and working in Abu Dhabi. Through performance, assemblage and image, Yoonsik’s practice interrogates various boundaries and tensions in human life to ask how we could exist more meaningfully in a temporary, transient and turbulent world. Utilizing found objects, ritual and repetition, his works engage with themes of remembrance, witnessing and collective history. Yoonsik is a recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (2024), NYU Abu Dhabi’s Post-Graduation Research Fellowship (2023), and holds a BA in Philosophy from NYU Abu Dhabi (2023), where he studied Philosophy & Theater.

Ayesha Fernandes is a visual artist and designer and a member of the 2024-2025 cohort of the Assembly. She explores the material qualities of unconventional mediums by taking inspiration from nature and her surrounding environment. With a B.Sc in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah, her work often merges digital and analogue processes.