Acts of Looking Back

›Understanding‹ the other, excavating knowledge about the other on one’s own terms in order to render judgment or confirm prejudice, marks local and global realities significantly in seemingly disparate fields as art spectatorship, modern warfare, online dating, surveillance mechanisms, psychiatry, the movement of bodies between nation states or labour within the experience economy.

The violent gaze and its insistence on unilateral staring, where established hierarchies are maintained by their unmet gaze, brings us to this series of video works that constitute Acts of Looking Back. They serve as pieces of postinstitutional critique, playfully exceeding rationality and mere cognitive judgment in favour of affect, ambiguity and opacity.

We begin with Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966) in which the choreographer translates into dance some of her No Manifesto’s claims quite remarkably: no to spectacle, no to the heroic, no to trash imagery, no to involvement of performer or spectator, no to style, no to camp, no to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer, no to eccentricity, no to moving or being moved.

In Trio A, the dancer is to never make eye contact with the live spectator. Yet how can Rainer’s ideas be made useful in times where we have all learned to perform for camera, where being observed, assessed or under surveillance at work has become commonplace? Where personal trauma cannot be disassociated from the way one is looked at on screen and on stage? Where one perhaps wishes to return the violent gaze instead of constantly avoiding eye contact? How can queer bodies or ›othered‹ bodies on screen challenge the exoticising, legitimising or delegitimising gaze instead of merely feeding the need for ›edgy images‹, moving stories and engaging entertainment?

One answer is Nazlı Dinçel’s Solitary Acts #4, where the artist’s vagina dominates exclusively the act of looking at the audience. Another answer could be borrowed from Cecelia Condit’s operatic fairy tale Possibly in Michigan: »I bite at the hand that feeds me, slap at the face that eats me…«
_Vika Kirchenbauer