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FKA twigs has spoken frankly about the “healing journey” she has undergone as she unveiled her latest project, which is about using movement to overcome past trauma.
On Friday, the 36-year-old musician opened “The Eleven”, a dance performance and exhibition showing at Sotheby’s auction house in London for two weeks.
There are three rooms: one filled with large-scale nude portraits of twigs captured by her partner, the photographer Jordan Hemmingway. Another is filled with her scrapbooks from the project, and a third room houses a blank stage, which slowly becomes the dancefloor for 11 “movers” performing a ritual-inspired routine choreographed by twigs.
Speaking to The Independent at the exhibition’s opening, twigs, who is also an dancer and actor, explained the 11-step meditative routine is something she developed to help improve her own mindset and overcome trauma.
“Over the past two years, I’ve been on a huge healing journey and have had to really use and live in my body again,” she said at Sotheby’s.
“I wanted to create something for my body that truly felt free; something that wasn’t exercise or dance or have any formal training in a traditional sense, but something that really subverted and also embraced what we can do with our bodies,” she said.
In 2021, the musician – real name Tahliah Barnett – filed a lawsuit against her former partner, the actor Shia LaBeouf, accusing him of sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress, citing “relentless abuse”. The actor will appear in court in October.
The pair had entered into a relationship after meeting on the set of LaBeouf’s semi-autobiographical film Honey Boy in mid-2018, and were together for a year before the relationship broke down.
Speaking about her dance project as a way of self-healing, twigs described the choreography in “The Eleven” as comprised of meditative actions, inspired by somatic healing methods she has picked up in recent years.
“Each one of the eleven have an embodied meditative action that I would encourage people to do for 11 minutes by yourself or within a group of like-minded people,” she said.
While she hopes audiences will find the methods shown in the free exhibition useful, she joked that she understands some might find it “too abstract”.
“People can come and learn about it. That would make me so happy. And if not, you found it abstract and different and move on,” she said as the techno music soundtracking “The Eleven” thumps in the background.
The opening coincides with the release of twigs’ first single in four years, “Eusexua”, the title song from her forthcoming album.
The inspiration behind the artwork and album is the feeling of “Eusexua” a term coined by twigs herself, which captures the feeling of profound clarity and creativity.
Speaking about the term to media, she described it as “the moment before you get a good idea” or the “moment just before an orgasm”.
“I describe it as a moment before an orgasm, just a moment of nothingness, just a pinnacle of human experience. And in this busy world, that’s what I feel like I miss,” she said.
The singer said the word came to her when she was trying to express this feeling of finding joy in the modern world.
“Culture has gone so much into screens,” she said. “So much in the algorithm, and sometimes I’ve found myself not knowing what’s my opinion or whether it’s just something that my phone picked up.
In the past two years, twigs explains she’s been trying to root herself away from screens, and focus on self-discovery.
“I’m just to be part of a generation that grew up before phones. I was 23 or 24 when I got my first smartphone. I grew up in the country. I had a burner phone when I was 13, but I wasn’t on it. I didn’t really care; there wasn’t this attachment. I was really lucky in my teenage years to spend them growing up in a state of eusexua.”
The exhibition is in collaboration with her partner, the photographer and film director Jordan Hemmingway, who she lives with in east London.
Hemmingway was involved in the artistic production at Sotheby’s and was responsible for producing a series of 14 large-scale photographs of twigs executing the movements she developed for the project.
“The Eleven” runs from 14 to 26 September at Sotheby’s. “Eusexua” is out now.
