The installation consists of only a handful of elements: five yellow mesh hangings which divide the gallery, four oversized kitchen colanders with text engravings, a pair of traffic lights. The constellation turns the gallery into a stage set in search of a script.
The programme promises the world. We’re watching comedia dell’arte! These objects are “experiences of power” and “satires of social hierarchies”! They question “agency and authority” and engage us in “roleplay”!
All those would be great plot twists, but the play has been cancelled. The actors are missing and there is no story, neither forward nor back.
Why theatre, why these notions, why these props? Having forgotten what the ‘dramatic’ in art stands for, visual artists today too often mistake hacked theory and mistranslated philosophy for stage directions. A tragedia dell’arte for our times.
