Moussem Open Studio | Remembrance: Crystal Tears by Hend Elbalouty

A performance–lecture unfolding between ritual and text, tracing how grief, memory, and breath shape the body.

Rooted in studies of indigenous healing practices and animal–human relations, this ongoing research explores how grief, memory, and displacement live within the body — and how ritual, trance, and gesture can become acts of remembering and resistance.
In this phase of the research, Hend turns to the meanings and roots of classical Arabic words, as well as texts of lamentation, as portals for embodied memory. By re-voicing these words, through breath, repetition, and vibration; this work seeks to uncover how language itself can awaken ancestral traces within the body. It forms an open invitation to ask: how does the body remember when the land is lost?

Through fragments of movement, sound, and spoken word, the open studio session unfolds as a work-in-progress — an open process rather than a finished form, a space where the body listens, recalls, and transforms.

About the artist

Hend Elbalouty (EGY/DE) is a choreographer, performer, writer, and body practitioner working at the intersection of cultural practices, social class, and artistic expression. She holds a Master's degree in Performing Arts from the Cologne Academy of Media Arts and actively researches cultural practices and the representation of social class in the arts community. Her work explores the politics of movement, particularly through her award-winning performance inspired by Egyptian street dance (Mahraganat), for which she was awarded the Grand Art Prize of the Friends of the KHM in 2021.

This research led to her first book, Mahraganat Dance: Between Acceptance and Rejection (2023), which she has presented in cultural centers in Germany and Egypt. Hend has taught movement and performance at the University of Cologne and various independent institutions, focusing on embodied text, self-expression, and the healing potential of artistic practices.

Hend transcends artistic boundaries by integrating the Arabic language into performances in Germany. She explores the role of art as a tool for empowering the individual and making neglected forms of expression visible.

Doors: 19:00

Start time: 19:30