Act as if you know your place!

Video performance, 2022 – ongoing

In 2019. I went on a tourist trip with my friend to the Netherlands. It was the first time for both of us to travel to the West. We were planning this trip for years, collecting both money and courage. There we visited a lot of museums, among which there was Voorlinden, a private museum that exhibits some of the most famous products of the Western art market. There, my work began. To be exact, on the 13th of September 2019. Now I cannot recall what was the exact feeling… a mixture of feeling submissive, angry, paralyzed, panicked, again anger, and some more humiliation. “I feel like I should be cleaning the toilets here, rather than doing what I’m doing now”, I said to my friend. This was more like a joke, but the joke that triggered an actual act, the joke that actually sought relief, for a fast solution to this absurd problem I faced.

I am washing guest toilets in the art institutions. This action in a public space is a base for an in-depth investigation of my experiences and feelings of (dis)comfort while visiting museums, galleries, etc. This action represents a tool for a quickly found pleasant position and “my place” inside the Center of the capitalist world.

Almost all of the problems I’m experiencing as a periphery person are a result of the general dispersion of the peripheries. This doesn’t allow a visible space for rest, empowerment, or even for imagination. I think that is why I strategically used toilets as spaces in-between, the ones I could hide in and where I could make a break. I used them and claimed them, as a space I can breathe the way I normally breathe.