YUKI KOBAYASHI

"I or Another" 2020

 

Performing online through the screen with invisible audiences reminds of an online live sex in pornography, which includes the risk of showing body unknown and commercialisation of gender. In the history of Performance Art, artists were risking their bodies to open the boundaries between an artist, space and audience. During the pandemic of COVID-19, performance was restricted. But also it gave me opportunities to think what is definition of being live in the present era, how the body coexistence in a digital realm between here to there, real and unreal and synchronicity of self and someone who have never met.

 

“I or Another”, is the performance to build a sculptural portrait. It seeks the neutral of gender from the approaches of risking and social responsibility to have a male body, inconsistence of gender,　sexual orientation and superiority of majority. In the performance, I extracted my sperms and recorded it on iPhone. I knead them into a white stone powder clay and push out from the meat mincer. The action of grinding mincer is synchronising the extraction by masturbate and spiral moving sperms. It keeps building a sculptural portrait with tracing a move of sperm and the clay that gradually hardens expresses the masculinity left behind modern society. 

 

When sperms moves without my intension inside and outside of the body, it already becomes a self portrait. But also it has the possibility of becoming another portrait through the boundary of sociality. “I or Another” is questioning the deconstructing the boundaries inside and outside of body as materials, who am I performing for, what do I get from barren movement if the screen is extension of the body.