Movana Chen: Questioning The Line

The latest live performance in artist Movana Chen’s ongoing Body Containers series. In Questioning the Line, Movana Chen and a group of dancers subvert human divisions through performance. Within Chen’s Body Containers – interconnected wearable sculptures – the dancers form living statues periodically emerging into stillness and coordinated movement to explore relationships with one another and with the audience.

Presented for the first time in London, the work cultivates shared experience that transcends geopolitical borders. The piece draws on maps, not as background, but as material: shredded cartographic imagery is reshaped into Chen’s Body Containers, embedding questions of territory directly into the body itself.

At its core, the work treats the body as a vessel for stories, histories, and languages, tracing the visible and invisible boundaries that shape how we understand bodies, land, and identity. In a world increasingly shaped by division, displacement, and ecological uncertainty, Questioning the Line invites us to reconsider the lines we draw and to imagine a more interconnected way of being. It is an act of remembering our shared belonging to the earth and our responsibility to care for it.