(2 mins 30s – sound on!)
Video of live performance, which took place at Ruup & Form Gallery, London, 26th May, 2024. The Video was shown as part of the Vice & Virtue show, curated by Claudia Clare. (It was also featured by Andrew Doyle on Free Speech Nation, 11/08/24 – see below)
Eggshells are at the gallery entrance; you must stand on/break them in order to enter. At the same time, Con-She ‘encourages’ you with a megaphone to “be kind”. When you succeed in entering, you are rewarded with a ‘woke cookie’.
I find myself noting the odd dichotomy between the exhortation to ‘be kind’, and the often rather psychopathic behaviour of those urging it. It is a strange zeitgeist where a sort of authoritarianism is enacted regarding others’ beliefs and behaviours, from within a politics that claims ‘kindness’.
Obviously ‘walking on eggshells’ is a reflection of how on edge all the time we now feel, at a time when good faith and intention is side-lined, whilst language and newly-minted social mores are hinged to virtue, the rules regularly and arbitrarily changed, yet complete adherence a requirement, lest we be cancelled without redemption.
So much of the culture surrounding this stuff is insidiously draped in rainbows and unicorns and glitter. Con-She satirises that clownish aspect – as a much more sinister clown, in this case, overtly bullying others into conformity and discomfort.
It took over three years to find a gallery that would allow this performance to take place.
