I promise, mute body, 2026
Exhibition at Goethe-Institut Boston with Sylvie Mayer
May 18, 2026—May 31, 2026

“Man is a true narcissus, he makes the whole world his mirror.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Using the mechanics of myth, Ena Kantardžić and Sylvie Mayer converge around Narcissus. The exhibition considers practices that produce illusion while remaining vulnerable to mistranslation, failure, and transformation.

A choreographer translates movement from one body to another, from intention into embodiment. Kantardžić approaches this through code written in a language the machines cannot fully comprehend, allowing errors and drift to become structural.

Mayer’s paintings draw conceptually from the 1911 ballet Narcisse, choreographed by Michel Fokine for Vaslav Nijinsky. A critic condemned its final transformation, in which Narcissus becomes a flower through an obviously artificial prop whose visible falseness disrupted theatrical illusion. Here, that rupture becomes productive rather than dismissive.

Kantardžić transfigures narcissus flowers into lighting gels that bathe space in shifting color and opacity. Light from Kantardžić’s HUBRIS exposes the painted surface of Mayer’s Narcisse, revealing where oil paint turns opaque or transparent, and where illusion begins to fail under scrutiny. Under certain conditions, representation collapses into its own construction, exposing the labor behind its coherence. I promise, mute body asks whether hubris operates similarly: whether the illusions produced by overconfidence inevitably disclose their own instability when held in a different light.

Dancers: Luke Hatzis, Addison Husband, Izabella Latessa, Sawa Machida, and Ben Nir
Choreographer: Mary Ann Mayer