NOIR PERFORMANCE by Luanda Casella
In the exhibition BORDERS, artists and scientists explore what borders are and what they mean, as well as how they restrict, exclude, define or transform. The exhibition invites visitors to rethink, push back and, at times, cross borders.
With NOIR PERFORMANCE, the Brazilian-Ghent-based artist and researcher Luanda Casella takes the exhibition out into the city. She carries out artistic interventions at various specific locations along Ghent’s waterways and within the museum. Casella hijacks the language of power: the cold, clinical language of marketing, corporate jargon and the efficient slogans that permeate our society. By disrupting this language through rhythmic, playful, absurd yet razor-sharp quotes, she causes the logic of the free market to grind to a halt in a series of linguistic glitches.
Her sentences lay bare the friction between the systems that govern us and the bodies that must function within them. With NOIR PERFORMANCE, Luanda Casella explores one of the central questions of the exhibition BORDERS: what happens when boundaries begin to clash?
Through large-scale text installations along the waterfront, posters and a sticker campaign, the intervention presents itself as a marketing campaign – but one that sabotages its own logic. What begins as recognisable corporate communication gradually shifts into something unsettling, absurd and confrontational.
The phrases pop up in the urban landscape and momentarily throw passers-by off balance.
Casella deliberately breaks the unwritten rules: about how language is used, what we consider normal in the urban landscape, and how we react to provocative messages, confronting us with what we do and do not register as provocative. Where does communication end and manipulation begin?
NOIR PERFORMANCE is not a marketing campaign.
It is a bug in the system.
About Luanda Casella
Luanda Casella is a Brazilian writer, theatre maker and performer who lives in Ghent. Through her work, Casella explores everyday communication and the influence that communication has on our perception of the world. As a resident artist at NTGent, she has created several productions, including Short of Lying, which was staged at the GUM, amongst other venues. She has also created an installation for the exhibition Wunderkammer of TRUTH.
