Madi Awadalla + Najwa Ahmed

The Erotics of Surveillance, or How to Become a Conspiracy
Madi Awadalla

After a Sin Comes Confession
Najwa Ahmed

The Erotics of Surveillance, or How to Become a Conspiracy is a lecture-performance that follows the interplay between queerness and espionage. It investigates how the body learns to watch and to be watched: how to hold a dangerous secret, how to sense when a gaze hardens into suspicion, how to live when every gesture carries risk. Drawing on ongoing artistic research, the piece moves between film clips, historical material, and personal confession to trace how suspicion and disruption travel across time and place. It links state paranoia, intelligence regimes, and the criminalization of illicit intimacies with present-day surveillance practices. 

After a Sin Comes Confession is an anthology of grief that weaves an intimate portrait of questions that open wounds, doors, and cans of worms, suggesting that asking difficult questions is never clean: it exposes, destabilizes, and perhaps ultimately liberates.

The work approaches grief as something that does not simply pass, but remains attached to the body. Moving through memory, residue, and ritual, it allows confession to unfold as performance, grief as shedding, and rebirth as something earned through witnessing.

Madi Awadalla is a writer, historian, and transdisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, visual storytelling, and multiple forms of writing. Working through counter-histories, archival intervention, and embodied research, their work explores the politics of the body, borders, and belonging.

Najwa Ahmed (they, she) is a Palestinian, Berlin-based visual artist and community organiser. Driven by curiosity, Najwa explores their intersectional identity and the world around them using various artistic mediums; poetry translates their queer journey, film interprets their position as a thorn in coloniality's throat, and with performance they traverse resistance by occupying anti-liberation spaces.