eAt me...
crazinisT artisT's (Va-Bene E.K. Fiatsi) recent performance, 'eAt me...' explores the 'hybridity' of forms, spaces and structures as ‘inherent’ components of performance art and therefore decontextualizing the relationship of the body to the society and its normative cultures at large. The performance was juxtaposed to a meat restaurant in the Jubilee Mall of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology where the artist laid nude in his own blood for five hours motionless
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crazinisT perceives the human body as a colony of societal norms, codes, taboos and doctrines striving against oppressive prejudices. However, the performance exploits the ‘aesthetics’ of human right violations, sexism, gender violence, political injustice, xenophobia and religious extremism as a social process within our global community. It seeks to re-examine the paradoxical relations of human right and international political structures that claim to protect the marginalized individuals and groups across the globe.
Synthesizing the iconography of funeral rituals of lying in state with an appropriation of the ‘last supper’ from the Christian literature, ‘eAt me…’ comments on the ‘pleasuring and commodification’ of marginalized citizens as victims of 'freak shows' drowned in ‘pools of violence’. The site specificity (Jubilee Mall) and the multiple-layers of the performance, reduce the human body to an exotic product as though to be bargained for, purchased and consumed, by presenting the artist’s body as a ‘provocative meal’ served in his own blood to the audience in an open-ended dialogue on humiliation of voiceless citizens and violations of human right.
The performance is a ‘passive critique’ to the holiness and wholeness of the so-called socio-cultural supremacists of the 21st century; a deliberate subversion that place the 'halos of saints' under the feet of the participatory-audience.
Image credit: Anwar Sadat Mohammed, Martin Toloku and Justice Amoh