”Habit Bodies” – Zara Asgher & Laura Hasanen

Habit bodies is a two-person artistic project exploring the relationship between embodied histories, gender, and place.

Laura Hasanen (USA/FI) and Zara Asgher (PK) are Helsinki-based visual artists and art educators. The artists have been collaborating as a duo since 2022. Hasanen and Asgher work across video performance, text, and installation. Their practice addresses the relationship between gender, sexuality and power.

Habit Bodies navigates the relationship between embodied histories, gender, and place. The work focuses on the friction that emerges when gendered behavioral patterns are challenged or resisted. The effort to disrupt these norms can feel like coming up against a wall—unrelenting and deeply rooted, a barrier that reveals the depth of habitual and conditioned ways of being.

Habit Bodies uses family as a framework to explore these points of friction. The artists explore gesture, body language, and storytelling as ways of understanding how these points have shaped their relationship to gender and place. The piece tells the story of family expectations and awkward failures. Two bodies attempt to wiggle around, avoid, reject, and even conform to a repetition of corrective gestures, attempting to straighten their clumsy presence.