YESNO/YESNO
Collaboration with Kaeto Sweeney(CERGY 2016)
This collaborative exhibition with Kaeto Sweeney was a playful space of orders and prohibitions. His works focused on the absurdity and impossibility of communication through words, while mine were sensory musings on our notion of cultural and material hierarchies.
Upon entering, visitors were served pastel coloured ‘fortune jellies’ - horribly rubbery in texture with a melange of tastes from the drinks aisle of an Asian supermarket. Fortunes, originating from a Chinese almanac available in English online were edited and badly translated into French by google translate. Any accuracy these predictions may have had was removed by this digital game of Chinese Whispers before being partially consumed, deciphered and possibly believed by amused jelly-eaters.
A luminous, almost opaque inflatable healing chamber filled with the scent of Chinese medical ointment swayed in a corner as visitors walked around it, before entering three at a time to find an intimate oasis of calm, despite the carrying sounds from people outside this bubble.
In the opposite corner was a luscious private changing room made of sari fabric in which, one by one, visitors could remove their shoes, step in and be wrapped in a sari then left to feel the cloth against their skin and look at themselves in a mirror before disrobing and leaving with that as the only memory - selfies were prohibited.