Suspended by Optimism

Installation and performance. For Brooklyn Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach, December 2014

Suspended by Optimism is a performance installation that explores levity as resistance, transcendence, and quiet rebellion. Over four hours, the artist’s body remains suspended mid-air, tethered by helium balloons, held in delicate tension between ascent and gravity, breath and presence. A living sculpture in motionless suspension, the work conjures a meditative pause between earth and atmosphere.

Presented as the ceremonial opening of a benefit gala for the Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art and the School of Doodle, the performance serves as a ritual offering, where still elevation becomes a metaphor for hope, endurance, and the potential of the human body to transform silence into expression. The piece invites collective reflection, inviting audiences to consider presence as protest and breath as the architecture of transformation.