Adelita Husni Bey: Agency

Agency (2014), film still. High-definition video, 40’. Courtesy of the artist.

Adelita Husni Bey
Agency

June 4—November 8, 2026
Dome Theatre

2014, Rome, Italy.

Thirty-five students at Manara High School take part in a role-playing workshop modelled on a group exercise, derived from a 1970s UK critical civic studies curriculum method. Led by Italian-Libyan artist Adelita Husni Bey, the students are divided into five constituencies – politicians, activists, bankers, journalists, and workers – and asked to engage with pressing issues in contemporary Italian politics, including unemployment, snap elections, and natural disasters.

In the months leading up to the workshop, the students met with economists, trade union leaders, journalists, editors, and activists, nurturing a deeper understanding of the responsibilities, challenges, and limitations that colour and contour the roles they chose to play. More than a mere transfer of knowledge, these encounters act as a form of slow initiation. The workshop that follows is not a lesson in governance, but a rehearsal of it: a makeshift society in which competing groups seek to assert influence. Alliances must be constantly made and unmade, and no position holds without being continually defended. Everyone has an agenda, and every agenda is performed, tested, destabilised in real time.

The workshop unfolds through various stages. First, the day’s headlines are read from local newspapers; in response to those, the different groups develop strategies in relation to the unfolding of so-called historical events in the game. Then, the journalists prepare a newsreel, after which the different groups award each other “power points” depending on who they believe has retained or maintained power during that round of the game. These points determine the relative influence of each constituency in subsequent rounds, creating a shifting balance of power that structures the workshop as it progresses.

Throughout this exercise, power and authority are produced through a rehearsal of collective belief. Political agency flickers, earned and withdrawn in the same breath. It may be won, yet it is constantly questioned; public opinion can (and perhaps must) be shaped. As the workshop progresses, journalists continue to document the unfolding developments, becoming not mere observers, but active participants in the construction of the social reality around them. Information is power, but it also circulates unevenly; and positions of influence are constantly renegotiated.

Presented more than a decade after its completion, Husni Bey’s Agency (2014) is a documentation of this workshop, reflecting on the nature of power; the ways in which it manifests and operates; and how it may (or may not) be effectively used. Both disquieting and astute, the work resonates as urgently today as it did at the moment of its making, 12 years ago.

Curated by Muriel N. Kahwagi.

Please Note: The Dome Theatre will be closed on September 24; Adelita Husni Bey: Agency​ will not be on view on this date.

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About the Artist

Adelita Husni Bey (she/her)

Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue whose practice draws on anarcho-collectivism, theater, and legal anthropology. She organizes workshops and produces artworks using non-competitive pedagogical models within the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, poets, and educators, her work creates temporary sites for collective study and rehearsal. She represented Italy at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and has exhibited in New Photography, MoMA, New York (2018); The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale (2015); and Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014). A 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellow, her research examined how pandemics reshape social relations. For Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025) she produced Like a Flood, a film installation on water extraction, infrastructural afterlives, and adaptability. She is currently developing a long-term research and performance project on Porto Marghera's petrochemical plant, toxic legacies, and citizen science and has recently undertaken a residency at Ocean Space, Venice.