Each year for our school yearly exhibition, the Painting department spends thousand of euro to burn the paint off the floors, paint the walls white, and do whatever it can to make our studio spaces look like a white cube gallery. But there is always 1 - 2 rooms whose doors are closed, used as a storage space for the undesirable things that are not to be shown to the public.
The act of lobotomizing the Process from the Product, the Mess from the Art, History from the Present, to hide the Undesirable from Desirable Capital (visitors with art-buying power, potential student artists, board members, the general white German society), is in all ways related to the structural exclusion I felt at the school and the colonial erasure of Global South art history at such racist cultural institutions, including the living history.
In this performance, I cracked open the door of the Storage Room for 40 minutes, and played a concert of live improvisation, noise, using just my breath and voice through a microphone going through four effect pedals into an amplifier. I sat under a table, obscuring myself from the public view. So that to the audience outside, the sound is perceived as coming from the Storage Room as its own Entity.
Documentation (credit Aram-Alsaed):
Storage Room Song for and from Non-Beings in the Non-Space
Performance, 2023
