The only delineation of space in Stranger (2017) [PG.TK–TK] is the vertical orientation of Naama Tsabar’s body in a cyc, a white seamless stage space. She negotiates wires with her feet, spinning and dipping against the weight of a heavy silver instrument comprising two electric guitars attached back to back and sharing a body. She plays the outward-fa-cing side, while banging the inward face against her body, producing a melodic growl. Kristin Mueller soon enters. She yieldingly adjusts the amp and then meets Tsabar; they both take a moment to adjust either the volume or the tone. Seemingly in agreeance, they bow their heads trustingly into each other’s shoulders and necks. Their joining is as cataclysmic as it is erotic, honest as it is rough, vulnerable as it is painful. Both are dressed in some variation of black boots, black pants, and a white shirt, and as the uncanny electric sound opens its jaws, the bodies bend and contort, at times appearing conjoined. The perfor-mance produces a music as disso-nant as it is beautiful: a transpa-rency that unplugs the ego. In the end Mueller holds the guitar alone, and after Tsabar squeezes the double necks to tinge the sound, she walks away and cuts the power to the amp. A touch of cruelty:
A communication desisted: Consummation, perhaps.

NAAMA TSABAR
Tsabar’s installations and performances—inclusive only of feminine, femme, and gen-
der-nonconforming persons—aim at incarnating intimacy, sex, and vulnerability. As Judith Butler asserts in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” “Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.” (01) An intimacy scripted by gendered expectations creates power structures that siphon off the oppor-tunity for something purposeful leaving behind the shoulds, pulling all involved into a performative subjunctive. Stranger represents the erotic, trou-bled, desired, and ecstatic experience of intimacy, absent the essentialized power struggle with the patriarchal subjunctive.
The minimalism and performativity of Tsabar’s art highlight the subjectivity of the viewer and at times ruffle audiences that fail to interpret their positionality to it. In “Dada Manifesto, 1918,” Tristan Tzara states:I quote this passage because Tsabar shares this intolerance for repetition and agreeance as progress. For both the writer- philosopher and the artist (who have the same birthday, Tzara a Jewish Romanian, and Tsabar a Jewish Israeli of Romanian descent), universality is a disgusting limit that penalizes the creative in the name of order. Tsabar, like Tzara and his crowd, is interested in the instantaneous transformation that sound can effect and how one’s reticence to noise without form can reveal the ego. To make incongruent sound is to dissolve it.
Cacophony is natural cadence. Tsabar’s work is determined to reveal how socialized logic is a track that precludes
the creation of an autonomous self. Without the symbols attached to certain gendered gestures, who do we become? Warhol asks in America: “Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think that it’s going to be just like it is now, only worse. But who’s to say that this idea is any more realistic than dreaming about robots?” (03) Tsabar poses similar questions in her work: Why can’t we get uncomfortable with decisions that we did not make but assume are inherent? What happens when we disidentify with violent gender politics and identify, instead, with vulnerability?
TEXT BY
JESSICA LANAY MOORE
`(03) Warhol, America, 186.