CAPITALISTIC PERFORMANCES

The video work Capitalistic Performances brings together product videos from a Chinese online marketplace. From pill boxes to life jackets, individual products are presented in lengthy videos, some lasting up to five minutes, in which the demonstrators remain silent. The people, often wearing sunglasses to conceal their identities, run their hands over surfaces, open and close objects, turn them around and demonstrate their functions. Their movements appear almost choreographed.

Against makeshift backdrops of white sheets of paper taped together, the products are put on display. Simple internet music taken from the original videos, ranging from piano melodies to female vocals, accompanies the gestures and lends the cheap mass-produced goods a peculiar, almost sacred aura. The matter-of-fact demonstrations take on a devotional quality, while the touches sometimes seem tender. The mass-produced object becomes what Karl Marx called a “sensuous supersensible thing”: a commodity fetish.