The Perils of Obedience (Premiere)
March 6–April 17, 2022
With an archival exhibition and web project on theperilsofobediencearchive.art
Curated by Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman
PARTICIPANT INC presents the concluding iteration of a twelve-year, multi-site project, Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE). THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (TPO) merges different media to generate a movie in real time, participating in a larger debate about labor conditions and subjectivity. As a whole, the project seeks to query the limits of film, performance, sculpture, and installation by deploying dissent as a tool to rewrite dominant narratives and open future horizons. Throughout the history of TPO, which has unfolded in Bilbao, New York City, Bogotá, and Rome, performers worked with directors to develop their characters. In each location, over time, this process was witnessed by audiences and recorded, to be edited later. As noted by art critic Ángela Molina, Barrio seeks to produce “an art of feeling, of bonds and symptoms that operate within a social order marked by class division and the imperative of capital.”
Itziar Barrio’s THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE) merges different media to generate a movie in real time, participating in a larger debate about labor conditions and subjectivity. As a whole, the project seeks to query the limits of film, performance, sculpture, and installation by deploying dissent as a tool to rewrite dominant narratives and open future horizons. THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE functions as an art project, an archive, and a platform for public events. In addition to an archival exhibition within the exhibition, writer and curator Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman conceived a website-archive, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (ARCHIVE), that occupies the online platform PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK.
Developed over the course of the exhibition as a living archive, the site catalogs the artist’s material and research oeuvre, indexing the mutual shaping that has transpired between the artist and the project — marking how Barrio has changed with and for the project, and highlighting ephemera most relevant to those changes. Referencing the filing cabinets or stacks of a physical archive, the site’s navigation points to subqueries or topics that link to its constitutive elements.
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