Morning Exercises

Concept and Performance: Sarah Raji Form: Video Art / Short Film

In Morning Exercises, Sarah Raji invites us into a surreal monologue, an intimate blend of anxiety, breath, memory, and imagination. This short video art piece weaves together morning rituals, aquatic movement, and dreamlike visual elements, constructing a poetic space where the body and water dissolve into one another.

The piece emerged from Raji’s ongoing fascination with movement in water and the sensations of aliveness it provokes. Initially inspired by a personal experiment floating in a pool, the artist began using her home fish tank as a medium of exploration. From fish tank to dance studio, home to studio, she crafted visual distortions and symbolic gestures using her hands, lights, shadows, and mundane objects, including a playful rubber duck.

Layered with a self-recorded voice monologue, the work becomes a miniature dreamscape, half-meditation, half-memory, where past lives as mermaids and gym mornings of mindful breath converge into a whimsical reflection on disorientation, embodiment, and fragile joy.