PERFORMATIVE SCULPTURES
Dani Bershan’s performative sculptures are monumental, immersive Gesamtkunstwerke that unfold over time through relational and transdisciplinary processes. Blending sculpture, performance, sound, and research-based practice, these works treat attention, touch, care and experimentation as primary materials.
GUT MATTERS
you’re body is a donut - the hole inside you is the world.
GUT MATTERS is a durational performative sculpture and immersive installation that explores the gut as a site of metabolic, political, and relational intelligence. Drawing on years of artistic research across science, poetics, and embodied practice, the work proposes that our current global crises are not only informational or ideological, but metabolic—rooted in exhausted capacities for sensing, digesting, and relating.
At the center of the work is a non-Newtonian fluid whose shifting viscosity responds to touch, pressure, and flow. Through this unstable material ecology, performers and visitors are invited into a shared field of emergence, where intuition, interdependence, and transformation unfold beyond linear time. GUT MATTERS asks what becomes possible when we attune to the messy, microbial, and affective processes that quietly shape how we live together.
OCEAN
you can write Atlantic on the ocean - it only says so much about what is really there…
OCEAN is a durational, immersive performative sculpture conceived as a monument to care. Within a shared, ritual-like environment, performers engage in repetitive acts of nourishment, breath, song, and maintenance, suspending linear time and inviting collective attunement. Care is approached not as service or sentiment, but as a sculptural force—slow, embodied, and relational—capable of shaping a temporary lifeworld.
Through sustained presence and subtle gestures, OCEAN foregrounds interdependence, attention, and the value of reproductive labor as political and sensorial practices. Nominated for the Feminist Art Prize, the work resists spectacle and urgency, offering instead an immersive space where care is rehearsed, felt, and held as a shared responsibility.
somatic DJing for horizontal people
CAVEMUSIC: somatic DJing for horizontal people is a durational performative sculpture that transforms sound into a shared, horizontal architecture of care. Participants are invited to lie down on individual beds, entering a collective ritual of listening, rest, and imagination. Through live sonic modulation, the work unfolds as a somatic environment rather than a performance to watch—shaping a temporary lifeworld where intimacy, attunement, and vulnerability are practiced without touch or speech.
Operating through her alter ego BABA ELECTRONICA, Dani Bershan approaches DJing as a form of caretaking and sculptural holding. Sound gradually envelops bodies, looping participants into a liminal state between wakefulness and dream, where individual boundaries soften and collective imaginaries emerge. Positioned as a non-verbal, non-sexual space for decomposing together, CAVEMUSIC rehearses connection beyond systems that privilege productivity, individuality, and control—insisting instead on our capacity to sense, rest, and imagine collectively.
CAVEMUSIC
Myography is a durational, performative sculpture and material choreography that records the marks of presence through bodies and movement. Developed as part of a long-term research into collaborative material traces, the work uses paint and PVC film that resist adhesion so that every gesture—however subtle—leaves a visible inscription. Installed throughout institutional spaces and carried through site-specific action, Myography turns movement itself into sculptural writing that refuses fixed form and foregrounds embodied relationality.
Presented at venues including De Appel Arts Centre and Wunderkammer Museum Katharinenhof, the work expands the field of sculpture into a live, collective choreography: material and body become co-authors of an evolving surface. In Myography, presence is neither static nor singular—it is a shared record of material and affective traces that gestures toward a collective archive of movement and encounter.
MYOGRAPHY
SPHERULE O MY
SPHERULE O MY is Dani Bershan’s graduation work from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and a formative performative sculptural laboratory in which studio, research, practice and outcome were inseparable. Conceived as an experimental environment, the work investigated auto-forming processes through living and semi-living materials such as fungi, paraffins, slime molds, and rhizomatic structures, allowing form to emerge through growth, decay, and interaction.
Rather than producing a fixed result, SPHERULE O MY established a mode of practice grounded in process, duration, and material agency. The work marked a foundational moment in Bershan’s artistic language, positioning performative sculpture as a field where research, material behavior, and embodied attention co-evolve into form.