Ira Melkonyan

Ira Melkonyan is an artistic and managing co-director of rubberbodies together with Jimmy Grima. rubberbodies is a research-based arts collective working through archive, pedagogy, and performative practices. Founded in Malta in 2009, the practice emerged from improvisational workshops and collective modes of creation and has since developed into a process-driven approach encompassing performance, installation, and site-specific work. The collective develops long-term artistic research that circulates through productions, events, publications, and a school conceived as a method of transmission rather than a traditional institution. Since the mid-2010s, its work has increasingly unfolded through international research, festival, and residency contexts, with activity based between Malta and the Netherlands from the early 2020s and presented across Europe and beyond. With its core activity between Gozo, Malta and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, rubberbodies focuses on context creation, listening, and sustained engagement, prioritizing depth, continuity, and process over fast outputs or spectacle.