No Lye, 2012, Single-channel video installation. HD video, excerpt from (TRT: 8:48)
Confined to a bathroom, five women communicate with words limited to political speech and advertising from Ebony magazine and Vogue. The women are engaged in the making of a bomb.
ABOUT No Lye:
No Lye features a bathroom full of women engaged in what appears to be the making of a bomb, while performing a script assembled from political speeches and adverts; David Cameron speaking on immigration is mixed with adverts found in Ebony magazine. Both these sources, the aspirational language of advertising and the contemporary politics of border control, draw rhetorically from neoliberal myths of capitalist freedom. This exclusionary rhetoric utilizes a binary rationale traceable to the Enlightenment: anything outside of this rationale is evil, over- or under-sexualized, different and feared. The relationship of the political language and the advertising spoken by these women portrays a rift between their collective presence and the words they utter. This ‘in-between’ opens an uncertain potential: like the energy contained in a poison or a bomb.
TEXT & IMAGE SOURCES:
Barack Obama, speech about Guantánamo and terrorism, 2009
David Cameron, speech on radicalization and Islamic extremism, Munich, 2011
George W. Bush, speech on terrorism, 2006
Mitt Romney, speech on immigration, 2012
Nazi Party Manifesto, Dachau Concentration Camp, 1920
Tony Blair, the prime minister’s speech, October 2, 2001
Ebony Collectors Edition, Jan 2009
Ebony Magazine, Feb. 1946, May 1946, Nov. 1955, Sep. 1989, Mar. 1990, May 1998, Apr. 2011,
Sep. 2011, Dec. 2011
Essence, Nov-Apr 1978-79
Vanity Fair, June 2011, Aug. 2011
Vogue, July 2011
PERFORMERS AND PRODUCTION:
Miriam Conner: performer
Jasmine Hughes: performer
Mireya Lucio: performer, continuity
Emilie Sabath: camera, performer
Francisco Janes: sound work, editorial advisor