Ariel Lembeck

I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Through my artistic practice I use performance, installation, and video to develop environments that challenge the presence of the physical body, shift perception, and reflect the power of the collective. At this year’s Gowanus Open Studios, I will be presenting an interactive installation as an invitation to consider personal and collective presence. During open studio hours, the public is invited to act, reflect and listen in different modes in order to activate this interdisciplinary installation and its corresponding materials and environments.

I am an interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across highly physical dance performances, public interruptions, and interactive installations. My work concerns itself with two interconnected but distinct processes. How we perceive the self and structures that govern the body, space, and time. In the creative process, it is these two dynamics that drive my concerns. I emphasize the effortful working body, making labor visible —sometimes excessive—to destabilize expectations and propose alternative relationships to power and care. I engage with and learn from feminist critiques of capitalism to approach mine and my collaborators working, laboring, effortful bodies in all their contradictions. Within my work, I treat space and time not as fixed nor neutral conditions, but as forces that adhere to and disrupt the systems that organize us. By making these dynamics explicit, I invite audiences into a collective experience, asking not only what we produce, but how we choose to be present within systems that demand our effort.