Antithesis
Performance | 2016, ongoing

Antithesis is a durational performance piece where audience is the performance and everything else is a decoy. A staged act draws a crowd. Phones come up. At that moment the work begins: photographers embedded in the crowd turn and shoot the spectators instead. The camera's direction is reversed. What is documented is not the performer but the reflex to document.

A second group moves through the audience carrying mirrors, polished panels, and screens, raising them to the exact height of a lifted phone. The person aiming to capture the act catches their own face. The question is not written on a wall label; it is put into the hand: what does it look like to be watched?

What follows stops being a performance and becomes a game. The audience begins evading the cameras while still trying to record the staged act, and the room organises itself around a contradiction nobody agreed to enter: the desire to capture, and the refusal to be captured.

My usual position is that public art belongs to whoever walks past it. Antithesis takes the opposite position and tests it. In public space, consent to be recorded is assumed rather than asked for, and the recording is worth something to somebody who is not you. In 2016 that was a question about phones. It is now a question about what gets used to train machines, and the terms have not improved.

Each iteration is built with local artists, photographers, and performers, so the work reads the specific room it is standing in rather than repeating itself.