Before I even stepped on stage at MANIFEST:IO, I felt something unusual: ease. That almost never happens. Usually, when I’m about to perform, especially for a large audience, I feel a wave of anxiety. But this time was different. It was as if the room was already tuned to the frequency of what I was about to share.

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I performed Broken Patterns, a multidisciplinary piece that explores the tension between tradition and modernity, routine and rupture, reflecting on how we carry on with our rituals while navigating a world that often feels like it’s coming apart. In my performance, I blend voice, electronics, field recordings, and the ney, a traditional Middle Eastern wind instrument. The tension between these elements mirrors the world I live in—a world that’s beautiful and crumbling, structured yet fraying at the edges.

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To give visual shape to these feelings, I worked with media artist Miraal Habib, who brought the paintings I created for this series into motion through projection. She added her own layer of interpretation that made the piece feel even more alive. I also wore a patchwork garment I’d made from childhood fabrics to give form to the fragmented realities the work explores. Broken Patterns is about holding contradictions: electronic and acoustic, east and west, dreams and collapse.

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The audience felt like my community, not spectators, but participants in the world I was discovering on stage. That feeling of togetherness, in fact, aligns with the piece, that even in dissonance and rupture, there’s the possibility of connection and transformation.

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As someone who works across sound, text, and visual media, I’m constantly looking for spaces where boundaries blur—where ideas don’t need to be explained, just felt. MANIFEST:IO created that kind of space. It held me, and in turn, held the work.

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This was the first time I shared Broken Patterns with the world. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to begin.

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Broken Patterns was performed by Nilgün Özer together with Ashley Maurice and Miraal Habib at MANIFEST:IO 2025
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With additional support provided by Parallel Processing and Hari Krishna

This article was written by Nilgün Özer and edited by Harshini J. Karunaratne