This lecture-performance investigates the ways in which we look at art online and how our view can be manipulated by digitalisation. What happens if you only see the online documentation of a physical exhibition? Have you actually seen the work? What is the importance of the physicality of sculpture and performance in the transmission of information? It would be an understatement to say that this work gained relevance in 2020, the year the pandemic sent the cultural field online, but the work was actually produced in 2019.

Some fragments of the performance text: 

“It’s easy to be judgemental about an online audience being lazy. But, just for a moment, try to visualise the group of people that will encounter this work online, behind their screens, spread all throughout the world. And not just now, but for quite some months, maybe even years to come. Funds increasingly value visibility not just offline but also online. So the fact that VHDG gets funding to have me perform for you here today, the fact that you can see this now, for free, is highly dependent on the fact that the online audience is watching. Because -they- are with many more than you are!”

“In Turkish there is a suffix that indicates whether the speaker describes something they saw first hand, or something they heard from someone else. So in everything you say in Turkish, you add that information by the way you conjugate your words. Always. (Or that’s what they say—I don’t speak Turkish.) It was only when writing this performance text that I realised I had been obsessed with menhirs for a while, but have actually never seen one in real life…”

“I frequently mix up the words requisite and relic because they are so much alike. A relic seems to offer security, something to hold on to, functioning as a kind of proof something in the past actually happened. A requisite often is much prettier because it’s made to be looked at, but normally hollow, or at least not meant to last. Or meant to see from far away or just one side; the perspective of the audience. I wonder whether art could have a bit of both. So that it is something that is meant to be looked at, and at the same time to hold on to, to remember. Both for action and for preservation. Something that can be yours, but that, simultaneously, can never be entirely owned by anyone.”

Voor de Schermen was produced during the residency of VHDG, Leeuwarden (NL), and presented in their exhibition space in June 2019.