2024/26
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 art 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 across borders and classes. Simultaneously, the performance investigates the dual role of performativity as both an artistic practice and a social expectation under neoliberalism.
Designed to evolve over time, Wear Me Out grows with new testimonies, allowing it to remain open-ended. Performed as a solo work, the performer uses a randomized game of chance in which the audience is invited to draw anonymized names from a plate to determine which stories are told in real time. Shifting between corporate satire (such as a live demonstration of a homeopathic remedy distilled from crushed grant rejections and sweat) and vulnerability, the artist’s body becomes a site of accumulation for systemic pressures. At its heart, Wear Me Out is not about solving exhaustion or transcending it; it is about staying with its textures, repetitions, and violences in a collective way, offering a space of shared recognition.
Documentation: Photos by Mariam Aloyan, 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.
First iteration: Performed during Body Fluids and Fantasies, hosted by the Wrocław Cultural Institute as part of the What’s Next programme (organised by the Gabriela Tudor Foundation, Wrocław Cultural Institute, and Proto Produkciia), Wrocław, Poland, 2024.
Second iteration: Performed at RIB, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2025.
Third iteration: Performed at Dingen die niet verkopen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2025.
Fourth iteration: Performed at ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art), Yerevan, Armenia, 2026.
As part of the research for Wear Me Out, The Exhausted project was initiated in 2024. It contains a series of six recorded conversations reflecting on the collective nature of exhaustion with artists Anita Rind, Min Yoon, Merve Kılıçer, Hedvig Koertz, Raluca Croitoru, and Sara Vermeylen.
This research was made possible with the support of CBK Rotterdam (Centre for Visual Arts Rotterdam).
This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.