Nesin Insen
FR
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2024
2024
2023
2023
©2026 Nesin Insen
Credit photo: Vincent Drouin
Bio
Nesin Insen was born in Tunis and is based in Wendake-Nionwentsïo (Quebec City). Their multimedia work, which includes video, sound and performance, has been showcased in various locations, including Wendake-Nionwentsïo, Brussels, Linz, Montreal and online.
In 2023, their work was featured in the group exhibition DENSE/DENSE at Laval University, for which they received a scholarship from the René-Richard Foundation and the Inter/Le Lieu prize.
In 2024, they were awarded a scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to pursue their Master's degree in visual arts at Laval University.
Process
I explore how my identities are embodied through speech, movement, action art, and encounter. I directly confront my body with words, objects, and people, bringing forth psychic and somatic memories that I modulate through improvisation. My practice, resolutely process-oriented, investigates what endures and what changes within me.For several years, I have worked with speech in French, English, and Tunisian. I deconstruct these languages and seek the transformations caused by their hybridization. I use automatic writing, vocal improvisation, and audio and video editing to create poems and sound pieces, videos, texts, and performances. My works blend phonemes and expressions, speech and writing. They blur linguistic and perceptual boundaries: French words are pronounced in Arabic, Arabic words are written in English. As a result, entirely new terms appear, unprecedented interstices between my memories are built, and new becomings take shape.
More recently, I have begun a research I call "topohaptic" (topography + haptic), even more focused on my tactile relationship with the world. Through direct contact with human, mineral, plant, or artificial bodies, I seek to capture somatic memories and bodily reflexes that these encounters evoke, then modulate them through improvisation. The senses of touch, proprioception, and kinesthesia are the beginnings of broader inquiries into the affective and social components involved in the meeting of different bodies. I thus hope to make topohaptics a framework for bodily and ethical experimentation, a zone of negotiation between norms and potentials.
In short, my artistic approach is deeply marked by my troubled experience of immigration. It acts as a process of (re)constructing the self, evolving through cycles in which my identities sediment and sublimate.