Flesh Memory

This work is a filmed documentation of a performance in which the artist reproduces her experience of witnessing a public execution as a child. Carrying a large, heavy animal carcass on her back, she walks away from the camera towards the horizon, where she hangs the carcass upside down from a parked crane truck.

The carcass functions as a metaphor for both the executed’s body and the artist’s own body. As a bearer of cultural and political signs, it acts as an archive of trauma, history, and memory. The hung carcass highlights the moment when violence reduces a person to flesh, an object. In the video, the artist identifies with both the victim’s selfhood and the object of their suffering.

2018

Video documentation of performance, colour/sound, 28 min, continuous loop