God’s Last Witness
Live performance and experimental video, 202513 Cycles
Church bells toll, prayers echo, flames rise.
God is present, absent, and ever-changing.
Staining flesh
like ritual,
bloody,
prophecy.
God’s Last Witness began as an hour-long live performance structured through thirteen cycles and performed before an audience. Through repetition, ritual, bodily endurance, fire, and sound, the work moves between devotion and rupture, presence and absence, sacrifice and witnessing.
The performance was recorded through a camera positioned by the artist during the live work. What began as documentation was later returned to as material in itself. The hour-long recording was edited into a fifteen-minute experimental video, accompanied by a soundscape created by Edvina Fahlqvist. Rather than reproducing the performance as it occurred, the video compresses and fragments its original duration, allowing gestures, repetitions, silences, and traces of the body to exist beyond the time of the live event.
In its installation form, the video enters into dialogue with a hand-dyed fabric by Mohammad Hadia (Bisho). The fabric may exist alongside the moving image or become its projection surface, allowing the recorded body, light, and image to inhabit the material itself. The relationship between video and textile shifts with each presentation, extending the performance from the body into image, sound, and surface.
God’s Last Witness exists across these different forms: the live body, its recorded image, and the material traces that remain after the action has passed.
Video duration
15 min
Presented
B7L9 Art Station — SENS Magazine Launch, Tunis, Tunisia, 2025
Soundscape
Edvina Fahlqvist
Hand-dyed fabric
Mohammad Hadia (Bisho)
