Haha Wang: Wicked Wickeder

With her performance Wicked Wickeder, the artist Haha Wang invites us to the basement of the Künstlerhaus Dortmund, which was once part of a mining gallery. The miners of the past have disappeared, but the behavior of the performers in Wicked Wickeder evokes associations with times past and is at the same time a reference to today's phenomenon of neatly staged food influencers who eat extravagant meals on Instagram in front of a live audience: Hanging from the ceiling in bondage gear, they collect food, edible sculptures from the damp, dark walls like coal once did, and eat them under the gaze of the audience and in front of the ever-watchful eye of a camera.

In Haha Wang's performance, the act of eating becomes an interaction between the body and the edible sculpture, a method of representation, a labor process, a voyeuristic self-exploitation of the digestive system. At the same time, the artist creates a place of self-healing and pleasure arising from gluttony and physical bondage, enhanced by the particular spatial experience in the diffuse light of the basement.

Haha Wang lived and worked as a resident of the program Zu Gast bei Urbane Künste Ruhr for one year at Makroscope in Mülheim an der Ruhr.