We moeten nog eens afspreken (2026) A lecture performance on conversation starters, the words we say before we really say anything. These small social scripts sound empty, but they do a lot. Moving from Malinowski’s idea of phatic communication to personal anecdotes, staged encounters and attempts at intimacy, the lecture keeps slipping out of lecture form. 

BILOBOJANA. Gestures of promise (2026) A lecture performance examining the gestures associated with making promises. Through drawings, historical examples, linguistic analysis and philosophical references, the lecture explores how people reinforce a commitment of the mouth through the hand. How do we deal with the troublous fact that every promise contains the possibility of its own failure? How do we negotiate the temporal leap between making a promise in the present and being expected to honour it in an unknowable future? 

IKKE NI (sit down/stand up) (2026) A lecture performance in which spoken word alternates with instructions. Sitting down and standing up are among the most elementary gestures of social life. We perform them constantly, without noticing. Yet every time we sit or stand, we reposition ourselves in relation to others. This short lecture performance examines how these bodily movements operate within systems of authority, obedience, care, resistance and exclusion. The audience is invited to repeatedly sit and stand under shifting verbal framings, revealing how meaning and power emerge through context. By simply complying, the audience enacts the language embedded in these vertical movements, and in doing so, begins to disrupt their automaticity. 

Other projects

Spoiler stories (2026) I composed six short stories from the final sentences of the 71 books on my bookshelf. Detached from their original narratives, the endings merge into new sequences in which suspense and resolution collapse into a continuous flow of conclusions. Spoiling the end of a story is a narrative crime, so I treated the final sentence as a literary unit that can survive independently from the story it once completed. 

The 78,161 Letters of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in Alphabetical Order (2026) The complete text of The Doors of Perception was reordered alphabetically. Without its syntax and narrative structure, the book decomposes into letters with a spatial rhythm. The 78,161 letters are painted onto the walls of a room. 

How Artists Describe What They Do (2026) Grammatical analysis of 8 artist statements, written by contemporary artists. The source material is taken from publicly available websites or exhibitions I visited. The artist statement is a coded and highly performative form of language. Separated from context and authorship, and reduced to a typological list of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, patterns emerge. Accompanied by written work, like the essays The grammar of originality and Brilliant bullshit: survival of the fittest exhibition text and the fable The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The work is presented as 8 A0 prints on display boards that is activated by a lecture performance.

The Nacho series:
A Portrait of the Artist as an Employee (2026) This short film follows my friend Nacho Vargas Ramos during one working day at Kunsthal Mechelen. He arrives, works, waits, works on little oil paintings behind the reception desk, and leaves again. The film lingers on the strange position of working in and for an art institution, while also wanting to be recognised as an artist rather than only as an employee.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Son (2026) In this audio work, Nacho recounts a trip to Ecuador during a period of personal instability. What begins with fear around his mother’s heart surgery turns into a ‘green light’ sequence of events, where one piece of good news seems to make room for the next. Through his voice, the portrait shifts away from the artist as a professional figure towards the artist as someone shaped by the love he receives and gives.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Woman (2026) Nacho painted a portrait of himself as a woman. I reinterpreted his self-portrait as a sculpture. 

Superficial (2025) Superficial is a booklet of twelve essays on surfaces. The booklet is presented in a box with a T-shirts carrying a short phrase from the work. There are 7 different editions. Each edition consisted of a text-and-textile set, offered in exchange for money or one of twelve predefined services. 

Mother of Pearl (2023–2024) Pearls form when a foreign object enters a shell. The intruding particle, often a grain of sand, penetrates the soft tissue of the mollusc, typically an oyster. In response, the tissue begins to secrete tiny crystals of calcium carbonate. Layer by layer, the oyster isolates its unexpected guest, reducing the irritation of its presence. A pearl is formed and continues to grow as a slow accumulation of layers around what was once an intruder. I purchased a saltwater pearl necklace from a specialized jeweler and cut the string to ingest the pearls, one by one. Each pearl passed through my body. It took me 6 months to recover the 44 pearls. The pearls were restrung and presented as a necklace on a jewellery display bust. 

The room where I may sleep alone in a bed meant for two on May 14th, 2025 (2025) I wrote a letter to Imogen Cunningham about my upcoming performance The room where I may sleep alone in a bed meant for two on May 14th, 2025, planned on the opening night of an exhibition. She replied: Dear Sara, Thank you for your letter and for telling me about the exhibition you’re working on. I hope you’ll understand that I prefer not to interpret the work of others, especially when it’s still alive and moving in its own direction. But I can tell you this. In 1957, while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, I overheard my friend and co-worker Dorothea Lange giving her students an assignment. She told them to go home and photograph something they use every twenty-four hours. That evening when I walked into the bedroom, my bed looked like a Eugène Delacroix painting. The sheets were messy, the pillow pushed aside, and a few hairpins still lay where I had left them that morning. A bed can say a lot without anyone in it. So I photographed it. I sometimes give this photo to newlyweds so they would know what life is like, and they shouldn’t expect the sheets of always be tucked in. With all best wishes for the days ahead. I hope your bed holds you kindly. Best, Imogen Cunningham. The exchange became a way of speaking with an artist who is no longer alive, while also testing the strange authority of interpretation. It placed my bed in conversation with another bed, another woman, another room, another time. Presented as a room where I may have slept alone in a bed meant for two on May 14th, 2025, and Imogen Cunningham’s letter pinned on the wall. 

The chicken series:
Lend an Ear (2023) A durational performance in which I spent a day sitting with nineteen broiler chickens in a shed next to a restaurant where guests can kill, pluck and cook their own meal. The birds were fasted and given water to cleanse their bowels. I took on the morally ambiguous position of being present with living beings that were about to be killed. I sat with them and waited in silence as the day passed.
The Waiting Room (2025) The work has evolved into a vinyl multiple with field recordings of the day, the sound of nineteen chickens sleeping, peeping, clucking, defecating, waiting, unaware of what’s coming. There are nineteen records, one for each chicken. It’s both an archive and a memorial. By playing the record, you bring them back to life but you also replay the time leading up to death. 

One of us (2024-2025) Skin imprints are temporary marks on the body left by narrow or textured surfaces, like the edge of a sock or a shirt seam. They appear when local pressure briefly restricts blood flow, causing a visible dent in the skin. Although often overlooked in daily life, skin imprints are hot within certain digital ASMR subcultures, where they are fetishised. Users post close-up images of embossed skin and receive comments coded with arousal and affirmation. These communities operate within the economies of the dark web and OnlyFans-like platforms, developing their own language of attention and reward. One of Us is an interactive installation that replicates this reward dynamic. It consists of a bench embedded with 3D-printed text fragments taken directly from comment sections in these communities. When seated, the raised text presses into the body, leaving a temporary imprint on the skin. Each fragment conceals a pressure sensor that activates visuals on a nearby screen. Shifting position triggers new content, creating a perverse feedback loop between body and image production. 

Telegony (2023) Telegony is the outdated and misogynist theory that the semen of previous sexual partners can exert a genetic influence on the future offspring a woman has with another partner. The work consists of an instruction to soak sheets of kitchen paper using an armchair and an iron, and then pin them on the wall in a specific configuration. The paper absorbs and retains, as a woman’s body was once claimed to do. 

ZERO ONE (2023) Live drawing performance. Electrodes on my left triceps and deltoid muscle received electrical impulses converted from live music by Michael Claessens, via a TENS device. The music did not reach me as sound, but as a series of electroshocks. Although the intention was to let myself guide by these impulses, trying to capture the music, the intensity briefly immobilised my shoulder and arm. The exercise became drawing between two pulses, trying to channel the music into drawing. 

Douanenachten (2023-2024) Pop-up exhibitions in my studio from dusk till dawn, where anyone could bring work to exhibit. For one night, we took over the entire building. The exhibition changed throughout the night. There was performance, spoken word, gigs, live drawing, chess, deep conversation and party until the sun came up again. I hosted 4 editions. 

Cum As Your Madness (2024) I performed as a dominatrix in Cum As Your Madness, an extreme haunted house performance by Marijke De Roover at KIOSK Ghent. The project explores feminist art history through the lens of witch hunts and uses the codes of BDSM to question physical boundaries. As performers, we immersed visitors in a sadomasochistic theatrical experience that staged feminist self-actualization against a macho hegemony. In my own work, touch is often abstract and implicit, but the character I embodied in Cum As Your Madness uses a form of touch that is direct and violent. Language was stripped of affection and staged as protocol. My character recited Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and had the participants repeat after her under the threat of torture. 

White Cube (2023) Performance with a washing machine. I installed a washing machine in a group exhibition and used it to wash one object each day, objects that don’t belong in a washing machine: oranges, colored pencils, concrete block, cardboard box, six pink inflated balloons, and a serving of fries with mayonnaise. Each item referred to a work exhibited in the show. This performance hints at the white cube as a closed system for attention. 

Sara Vermeylen

Sara Vermeylen (1983, Belgium) is an artist with a background in linguistics (typology, sociolinguistics and pragmatics), currently completing a degree in Fine Arts at LUCA School of Arts. She works with the lecture-performance as a form of artistic research. Through discursive analysis, drawing, and sound, she engages language to destabilise the political meaning of everyday gestures, reimagining their choreographic potential.
Contact via IG @saravermeylen.be