Event #5: 12 to 22 December 2019, Puck Schot, how many can kill your love
12 – 21 December 2019
Puck Schot | how many can kill your love
Vernissage: Thursday 12 Dec, 19.00
Artist: Puck Schot
Curated by: Anastasia Chaguidouline
PROGRAM:
Thursday 12 December: 19.00 | Vernissage and performance
Monday 16 December: 16.00 | Guided tour with the curator
Thursday 19 December: 16.00 | Guided tour with the curator
Sunday 22 December: 19.00 | Finissage and reading
Opening hours: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday 14.00 until 17.00 and Saturday and Sunday by appointment.
how many can kill your love is Puck Schot’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. The presentation is part of the collaborative curated program Choreographing the Public at the OnCurating Project Space in Zurich. Puck Schot’s work profoundly questions the boundaries between private and public, and the ownership of stories and storytelling in the age of digital. Her playful yet at times boldly serious performative and visual language includes for example footage of furries, a group of people with the mutual interest of dressing up as anthropomorphic animals in their free time, creating childlike alter-egos for themselves. This multi-media installation mixes cardboard and deteriorating plants, curtains and pillows, while confronting the viewer textually and directly with wrestling, spamming and bullying in different paces of the two video works.
The works tip over the edge of being autobiographical, inspired by hardships, driven by own fascinations in the time of digital and existential confusion. However the poetry, the tactically orchestrated distance between the artist and the viewer, allows space for fantasy and longing. The curated solo exhibition is the result of a close hands-on collaboration between Puck Schot and Anastasia Chaguidouline. The questions that addressed by the two central video works are autobiographical for both the artist and the curator. This exhibition addresses questions of privacy in the age of digital judging, vulnerability and identification. The textual work presented is based on spam e-mails, cyber-mobbing and personal dialogues. The footage for both videos has been recorded by the artist during her research travel to the USA during the summer of 2019.
Puck Schot was born in 1994 in Rotterdam (NL). Schot explores different realities and mind-states. Defining a modern desire remains key to her poetic work. In art, but also in for example through any social media-profile, we, individuals, constantly search for a perfect representation of our thoughts. With that search for ideal positivity and acknowledgement, there comes a disacknowledgement of lack, boredom, violence: darker needs caused by dissatisfaction. Through impulsively writing thoughts fragmentarily and by visually reflecting on that, narratives of fictive characters and alter egos start existing. Her work results in confessional texts, essays, audio and video(-installations). Often she also runs self-written and found texts through an algorithm that mixes the text into a new one. In video work, she often pays actors from online gig websites for a few dollars. Thus, a stranger performs a quite violent, confessional and fragmented script
(sometimes run through an algorithm) on their webcams for her.
This exhibition is part of the Choreographing the Public program, a multi-formatted programme featuring exhibitions, performances, interventions and screenings taking place from October 2019 to June 2020 at the OnCurating Project Space and other collaborating venues in Zurich. By shaping a “choreography”, the exhibitions invite visitors to take experimental routes, navigate, move around, and engage with the works. Receding from the traditional and passive experience of art, Choreographing the Public sheds light on the virtues of participation in redefining our relationship to art and power structure.
Choreographing the Public has received support from: Stadt Zürich Kultur; Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim Stiftung; Migros Kulturprozent; Cassinelli-Vogel Stiftung.