john's
The Puppet Show, Centre d'art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland
5 March - 17 April 2022
This exhibition displays the framework for a dinner party. The furniture, tables, chairs, cutlery and so on are tools for many things, especially socialisation, status, consumption and acceptable behaviour.
The invited guests are clients who actively use sex work websites. In order to seek an arrangement on a sex work website, the client must create a username. The sex worker also renames themselves to partake in this transaction but instead this is used for advertising, where the purpose of a clients username is to silently browse then consume.
The client of the sex worker is silent, omnipresent, without responsibility and shadowed by anonymity, therefore the ‘client' is commonly referred to as a john.
The invited guests have been taken from an archive of ten thousand john's usernames made by the artist. On each table there are individually addressed name place cards which have been handwritten by one of the artist's submissive men; she has then organised a seating arrangement of the sixty guests over ten tables.
All of the guests invited to this dinner live in Geneva. The furniture and it's decorations have been rented from a local events company.
Party planning is usually a woman's work.
The Puppet Show, a group exhibition curated by Mohamed Almusibli at Centre d'art Contemporain Geneve with Jasmine Gregory, Nils Amadeus Lange, Denis Savary, Linda Semadeni, Ser Serpas & Latefa Wiersch. Photos: Julien Girard and R Maybury
