Pretend
Presentation Video, 2022
This project started with a question: is performance art in such a state living or dead? At the same time, as it is not a direct event in front of me, all these records also make me think, could they be faked? Could I falsify the record of a work?
This thought arises because the work I have been making has always taken into account the audience's live participation, hoping that the audience will see art that is alive and not art that has died (which in the past tense). But if I start with such a fictional perspective about me and the work I have done, does it feel like a mix of reality and fiction? Many times science fiction maps reality, while their content might also be predicting a future scenario, and I want all these possibilities to be incorporated into this work.
Can the presentation of an artistic event before and after its beginning also prove its existence? Pretend that it exists. pretend, as a verb, has more layers than a mere defining word; I can wrap a truth in pretend, or I can wrap a falsehood in pretend, virtualise a tense in pretend, pretend to pretend.
Of course, there is more to this work than just being pretend, it is blurring the boundaries of definition and actually creating a pattern of definition again. It feels like a challenge to perception, because something changes its definition as time progresses, and this of course affects people's perceptions, so how do we define art?