Who Speaks When the Body Remembers? Embodied Lineage, Masked Authorship, and nature is an active agent in Practice-Research

Inessa Kalabekova, Universiti Sains Malaysia

This practice-research paper asks who speaks when authorship is distributed across bodies, materials, lineages, and space—where space itself operates as an active force rather than a passive backdrop. Drawing on my ongoing artistic research in performance, mask-making, visual art, and ritual-informed movement practices across Southeast Asia and Eurasia, I approach authorship not as an individual voice but as an embodied transmission shaped by inherited gestures, shared labour, and materially situated agency.

Central to this inquiry are performances in which masks are worn by multiple generations—myself, my children, and collaborators—shifting authorship away from individual identity toward intergenerational presence. In these works, masks function as living citations: carriers of ancestral faces, regional ritual iconography, and embodied memory. Rather than representing characters, they operate as temporary guardians, redistributing agency between human performers, crafted objects, and the sites they inhabit.

The paper further examines collaborative and improvisational methodologies in which authorship is co-formed through responsive exchange, shared attention, and care-based practice rather than fixed intention. These approaches trouble dominant Western notions of originality and ownership, particularly when working with traditional embodied knowledges that resist copyright logics.

Finally, by listening before speaking into form, the paper argues for rethinking authorship in artistic research as ecological and relational—a constellation of forces that speak through the body.

By listening before speaking into form, this paper argues for rethinking who speaks in artistic research—not as a singular voice, but as a constellation of relations that speak through the body.

Inessa Kalabekova is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans performance, visual art, mask-making, and ritual-informed movement. Born in Kazakhstan and based in Singapore, her work explores authorship, embodied knowledge, and intergenerational transmission through collaborative and site-responsive practices across Southeast Asia and Eurasia. Drawing on anthropology, folklore, and lived rituals, she approaches art-making as a relational process shaped by bodies, materials, and place. Kalabekova’s practice-research investigates how ancestral gestures and crafted objects operate as living archives within contemporary artistic contexts.