A brown human figure wearing a deep red sari and a tongue on its chin keeps getting in the way of Art.
It starts by standing to the side of the doorways, staring at people as they go around Oxford House enjoying the PbRP festival.
As the three day festival unfolds, this figure gets closer to the middle of doorways.
They gradually begins to reply to visitors trying to get past it.
The person interrogates visitors, telling them to prove themselves with no indication of how or why.
On the third day, it becomes known that Dushant has taken control of a space.
Prospective visitors are informed Dushant is not allowing in those that she doesn’t trust.
It never becomes clear how this trust is made.
This piece stems from my yearning for a sanctuary from Whiteness in my immediate environment. Though a sanctuary is commonly understood as a place of peace, designating a sanctuary from Whiteness in the centre of Britain reads to those who would uphold (deliberately or otherwise) White supremacy as a violent act. My project aims to reflect this ostensible contradiction by embracing the common reading of safe spaces by emotionally fragile members of dominant social groups (men, cisgender people, white people, able people) as antagonistic.
I intend to reverse the power structures which hurt me, those I grew up around, and those I organise for in my performance as it is not possible in everyday life. Through a durational intervention that culminates in an installation of my essence into a room in Oxford House, I aim to obstruct and reject the dominant bodies that so often obstruct and reject me from their country. While my audience shrouds its exclusion of Others in politeness, respectability and unspoken etiquette, I will flagrantly exclude my audience. This exclusion will be organised by whether I trust the individual attempting to pass me. I use trust because it is as abstract and undefined a qualifier as the informal criteria that regulates my entry into and behaviour in White, middle-class, able art spaces (such as Oxford House during the PbRP festival).
I hope to construct my persona/character/self and the contents of my claimed space to be similarly undefinable. This is to resist the Liberal arts audience’s fantasies of interpreting any and every artwork about marginalisation as a comment on Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit. My project is aimed to evoke a sense of securitised national/domestic borders, safe spaces and the politics of theatrical/art spaces in the UK without being reduced to a singular moral. This project is part of my ongoing research into confrontational participation in performance as a way of multiplying the potential ‘meanings’ that can be derived from the interactions between performer and participant.
It starts by standing to the side of the doorways, staring at people as they go around Oxford House enjoying the PbRP festival.
As the three day festival unfolds, this figure gets closer to the middle of doorways.
They gradually begins to reply to visitors trying to get past it.
The person interrogates visitors, telling them to prove themselves with no indication of how or why.
On the third day, it becomes known that Dushant has taken control of a space.
Prospective visitors are informed Dushant is not allowing in those that she doesn’t trust.
It never becomes clear how this trust is made.
This piece stems from my yearning for a sanctuary from Whiteness in my immediate environment. Though a sanctuary is commonly understood as a place of peace, designating a sanctuary from Whiteness in the centre of Britain reads to those who would uphold (deliberately or otherwise) White supremacy as a violent act. My project aims to reflect this ostensible contradiction by embracing the common reading of safe spaces by emotionally fragile members of dominant social groups (men, cisgender people, white people, able people) as antagonistic.
I intend to reverse the power structures which hurt me, those I grew up around, and those I organise for in my performance as it is not possible in everyday life. Through a durational intervention that culminates in an installation of my essence into a room in Oxford House, I aim to obstruct and reject the dominant bodies that so often obstruct and reject me from their country. While my audience shrouds its exclusion of Others in politeness, respectability and unspoken etiquette, I will flagrantly exclude my audience. This exclusion will be organised by whether I trust the individual attempting to pass me. I use trust because it is as abstract and undefined a qualifier as the informal criteria that regulates my entry into and behaviour in White, middle-class, able art spaces (such as Oxford House during the PbRP festival).
I hope to construct my persona/character/self and the contents of my claimed space to be similarly undefinable. This is to resist the Liberal arts audience’s fantasies of interpreting any and every artwork about marginalisation as a comment on Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit. My project is aimed to evoke a sense of securitised national/domestic borders, safe spaces and the politics of theatrical/art spaces in the UK without being reduced to a singular moral. This project is part of my ongoing research into confrontational participation in performance as a way of multiplying the potential ‘meanings’ that can be derived from the interactions between performer and participant.