2024/2025
Performance, approx. 40 min.
Wear Me Out centers exhaustion as a political and social experience. Across forty minutes, the performance refuses productivity in its usual, linear sense. Instead, it assembles a broken chorus of voices, gestures, and testimonies that speak to the lived politics of exhaustion.
The work draws from conversations with artists and cultural workers about exhaustion, alongside personal reflections, interwoven with fragments from articles, books, and other sources. Through stories spanning gig work, art-making, and migration, it reveals how exhaustion is unevenly distributed along lines of class, geography, gender, and labor precarity. At the same time, the performance critically explores the dual role of performativity as both an artistic practice and a social expectation under capitalism.
Designed to evolve over time, the work grows with new testimonies and ongoing reflection, allowing it to remain responsive and open-ended. The performer’s body becomes a site of accumulation – of histories, pressures, and silenced voices- transforming personal exhaustion into collective resonance. Wear Me Out is not about solving exhaustion, nor transcending it. It is about staying with it in a collective way, tracing its textures, repetitions, and quiet violences. In doing so, the work offers exhaustion not as a dead end but as a space of shared recognition.
Documentation by João Pedro Páscoa and Jerzy Wypych.
Special thanks to Marta Hryniuk, Paulina Woźniczka, Mariia Bakalo, Stefania Ferchedău, Cosmin Manolescu, and Gabriela Mateescu for the valuable conversations on the topic of exhaustion.
The first iteration was presented during the event “Body Fluids and Fantasies”, hosted by the Wrocław Cultural Institute as part of the What’s Next programme, organised by the Gabriela Tudor Foundation, the Wrocław Cultural Institute, and Proto Produkciia in 2024.
A second iteration of the work was performed at RIB in 2025. A third itineration of the work was performed at Dingen die niet verkopen in 2025.
As part of the research for Wear Me Out, I initiated The Exhausted, a series of six recorded conversations with artists and cultural workers based in Berlin, Rotterdam, and Brussels/Mechelen. These discussions reflect on the collective nature of exhaustion, asking: What does it mean to share experiences of being worn out? The conversations feature: Anita Rind, Min Yoon, Merve Kılıçer, Hedvig Koertz, Raluca Croitoru, and Sara Vermeylen. The Exhausted was made possible with the support of CBK Rotterdam (Centre for Visual Arts Rotterdam).
ari david 