Performance artist and ephemeral practitioner Fai Aldhukair's work unfolds through walking, score writing, and social choreography. During her MA artistic research, she developed a performative method which she calls "stealing time". Approached as a political tool, it is meant to preserve and create new relationships with space and time.
In 2026, U? once again opens up space for individuals and collectives who are closely connected to a community to step into a curatorial role. On Sunday, 8 November, Fai presents the first edition of Ephemera: Practices of Preservation.
Words by Fai Aldhukair
Artwork by christian sleiman
Ephemera: Practices of Preservation is an ongoing series of workshops, lectures, and performances focused on alternative and research-based practices. It brings together artists and students whose work unfolds through research and performance rather than through objects or not-yet tangible outputs.
The work starts from public space. Drawing from my own artistic research practice, I use performance as a way to engage with the everyday, with what is precarious and ephemeral, through embodied relations to space. Through written scores developed alongside everyday people in the city, I try to rework the social choreography of how we move through a place, to ask what possibilities exist beyond what the present spatial and temporal logic allows us to imagine. Within my work, there are barely any traces left behind. The work relies on the encounter.
Underneath all of this is a desire to bring back the agora. The disconnect between art and everyday life is only growing. There is a looming, almost fascistic feeling in the cultural field: a one-directional discourse in which we chant together with institutions what something is, but never what it could be, and an inherent need to exhibit our identities for profit. We continuously converse about art but rarely go further, rarely allow that conversation to develop into actual alternatives. Ephemera is that space, where artists, students, and everyday people encounter each other’s fragmented thoughts and unfinished research directly, not in order to produce a final polished work, but to build together a richer and more plural sense of what art can still become, beyond object, beyond thing.
Part of this means taking seriously a looming feeling that most students graduating within arts and culture carry, as it represents the very core of the art economy that exists: that their work is just that, their work, personal, not of importance or significance if not a sellable object or identity. There is a real need for spaces where developing research can exist alongside established practice, where the discourse grows in more than one direction. In Ephemera, students share their fragmented thoughts, ideas, and works within the same program as working artists. When someone encounters a student’s research in the same space, at the same scale, with the same audience as an established artist’s work, significance is shared spatially and temporally.
The project aims to create several iterations across different cities in the Netherlands, and over time at a transnational scale, each time engaging with what already exists within the physical and artistic landscape of that city and activating a conversation from within it.
Each iteration builds toward a collectively developed manual on preserving ephemeral practices. This manual gathers strategies, tools, and shared knowledge generated through the workshops and encounters, offering methods for sustaining performance-based and research-based practice beyond any single event.
