Transfixing and surreal, Find Your Eyes is a genre-defying meditation on memory, identity and the alchemy of image-making
Multi-disciplinary artist and self-described ‘choreo-photolist’ Benji Reid blends photography, movement and theatre to create something entirely unique: a live stage performance in which dancers, objects and light are transformed into extraordinary stills before our eyes. The show unfolds in a series of visual vignettes – part photoshoot, part performance – each one charged with emotional depth and visual power.
There’s a palpable sense of witnessing something in real time and yet beyond time. Photographs are projected onto large screens seconds after being captured, allowing the audience to experience both the constructed image and its creation simultaneously. Reid’s camera seems to possess a kind of magic – where a scene that might seem ordinary or even absurd in motion is rendered with elegance, poignancy and surreal clarity once frozen in frame.
In Chrome Wings, for instance, we watch as an assistant dusts a man’s body with flour, a moment that initially appears offhand. But once captured by Reid’s lens, it becomes something far more profound: the image evokes not just decay and disintegration but also resilience. It’s this juxtaposition – between the seemingly mundane and the deeply metaphoric, that gives the work its arresting power.
Throughout, Reid draws from a broad visual and cultural lexicon: Afro-Futurism, hip hop culture, surrealism, stark realism. Each scene invites interpretation, while also resisting simple conclusions. Some images are hauntingly sparse (the moving, black-and-white Portraits, Objects), others rich with colour and symbolism (Mum and the gods). The staging is purposeful – even the quieter transitions, as backdrops shift or lighting rigs are reconfigured, feel choreographed and poised.
What remains most memorable are the images themselves, many of which drew audible gasps from the audience, followed by spontaneous applause. These moments felt like collective intake and release, a recognition of beauty and pain captured at the same time.More than a performance, Find Your Eyes is an invitation into Benji Reid’s world: one in which storytelling is visual, emotion is movement, and the photograph is not just a document, but a portal. It is meditative, revelatory, and unlike anything else on the stage.
Review by Lauren Aitken