“I prevail with ‘what is at hand.’”11Senga Nengudi, “Statement,” accessed July 2, 2026, https://www.sengasenga.com/statement. This powerful sentence appears in Senga Nengudi’s artist statement, published on her website. As becomes clear from the rest of the text, what Nengudi prevails over is existing paradigms. One way the American artist has done this over the course of her five-decade career is by re-enfranchising discarded materials—newspapers, masking tape, stripped pantyhose, etc.—and integrating them into her installations and performances. Crucially, she sees these materials as continuous with her own body, especially when it comes to their reformative potential. Just like the artist, a stretch of pantyhose contains the possibility of finding its “poetic [self].”

The rubber bands in London-based artist Seyi Adelekun’s performance Attunement, which I saw on May 28 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, were a direct reference to Nengudi’s iconic tensile installations. Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Senga Nengudi: Performance Works 1972–1982, Adelekun’s performance honored the morphology of Nengudi’s art, incorporating everyday objects, spatial dynamics, and bodily movement. Upon entering the cavernous Assembly Room, the symmetrical arrangement of the bands, wrapped around two columns and secured to the floor by means of geometrically placed weights, created the impression of a proscenium. Reminiscent of the symmetries in Nengudi’s Performance Piece (1977), photographs of which were included in the exhibition, Adelekun’s installation seemed to push the threshold of latency. The columns were underlit in red, suggestively twinning with the color of the rubber bands. Something was bound to happen in a space drawn from, and with, the physical tension.

At around 7:15 p.m., Adelekun entered the space from the far end of the room, slowly walking backward through the aisle between rows of seats. Wearing only what looked like a two-piece swimsuit that nearly matched their skin tone, they at first appeared naked. Gliding their feet as they approached the middle of the space, their full corporeal presence gradually came into focus. Slung across their waist, a red band connected two white bags that slid heavily across the floor. Two additional accessories completed Adelekun’s already striking appearance: red anklets with little brass bells and an orange crown of meticulously braided hair with one, long central strand reaching back down past the performer’s tailbone. Having moved past the front row, Adelekun stopped and waited for an assistant to cut the two white bags open. The artist then continued their backward motion, tugging on the rubber bands with their hands as the salt contained in the bags slowly streaked along, leaving two parallel ridges behind. After reaching the columns, they emptied the remaining salt on the floor and discarded the bags in a corner.

Having, so to speak, set the stage for the performance itself, Adelekun engaged in a routine of unlatching the rubber bands woven between the columns and stretching them toward the audience. Walking on salt and pulling forward with their arms open, they countered strain with resolve. At moments, the proceedings resembled a dialogue—the resistance of materials testing not only the artist’s physical limits but also their imagination. The salt underfoot was an especially powerful aspect, complicating Adelekun’s advances by undermining the traction of their feet on the sleek concrete floor. Occasionally, the artist would shake the ends of the bands, activating the rattles that slid back and forth along them. At some point, the sounds of shaking rubber bands were joined by what sounded like a synthesized bass guitar, each rattle deepened by what felt like rhythmic accompaniment. Adelekun would take the ends of the bands and loop them over the other stretches of rubber, entangling them in a central net. At times, the artist would dance vigorously, sliding their feet through the salt and deftly dispersing it outwards without slipping.

The third “movement” of the performance involved Adelekun sitting down in a lotus position in the middle of the installation, using their hands to scoop salt up from the floor and pouring it gently over their head and body, streams of white flakes gracefully running down curves and muscle. This movement was accompanied by a soundtrack, a collage of pre-recorded voices making references to peace, strife, and ancestral protection. After standing back up, the artist continued to pull on the network of rubber bands, chanting what sounded like “…and again, and again, and again…” After quieting down and releasing the bands, they breathed deeply and, after a beat, bowed slightly to the audience’s applause. Adelekun exited for a moment and then returned, beaming, to even louder applause. Their light-footed departure, back through the installation and out the front door, felt like a well-earned triumph.

The gallery press release had promised that Attunement would approach healing “not as resolution, but as a continuous embodied practice where tension, pleasure and relief coexist.”22Whitechapel Gallery, “Attunement by Seyi Adelekun,” accessed July 2, 2026, https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/attunement-seyi-adelekun. And, indeed, the performance unfolded like a testing ground for something ongoing, its complexity extending far beyond the confines of the gallery or the art context. Building on Nengudi’s example, Adelekun revealed the search for a poetic self as a perpetual negotiation of circumstances, be they material, cultural, or political. Their acts of search and negotiation, of course, implicated everyone in attendance. This is probably why, by the end, a giddy sense of communion seemed to have taken over the room. As audience members started to trickle out, I stood in the middle of the installation marveling at the Rorschach-like beauty of the salt patterns across the floor. Against the quiet but insistent symmetry of columns, weights, and rubber bands, we had borne witness to something occult and vital—the art of withstanding.