Catalogue > At random

Within the performance and video work “Copy and Paste” Francis invites people from the public to enter the installation and take on the role of the teacher in front of a class of four ‘students’. In front of the class the assistant of the teacher helps people from the audience to recite from a scripted text. The text refers to dogma’s around art and has been run through Google Translate multiple times, causing errors that needs to be negotiated while reading it out loud. During the performance, both scripted and unscripted mistakes are made. Every time someone makes a ‘mistake’, the teacher’s assistant cleans up the person who made the mistake. In this way, a process is created in which all the participants in the room: audience, performers and artists have an influence on what is labeled as ‘fault’. By taking inspiration from the quintessential spaces for education, control and discipline, i try to flesh out a space that is familiar yet reminds us of those situations of subjection. The heightened awareness in this space, further amplified by a large ballet class like mirrored wall in the middle of the space, all windows covered with vaseline, a steel mortuary table and a series of morphic sculptures that occupy the space as silent spectators, confronts the visitors with what is left of us after endless loops of cleaning.

Benjamin Francis graduated from the Fine Arts programme at ArtEZ BEAR in Arnhem in 2020. Within his work he reflects on his lived experience of continuously being corrected for spelling mistakes, due to his dyslexia. These dissonances or errors are carefully corrected in our current-day society, as anything outside the norm is deemed unproductive and therefore excluded. By exposing the hidden dynamics of the power relations that structure and regulate the way we were taught to distinguish right from wrong, he questions how those systems came into existence and who holds the position to dictate those binary oppositions. Benjamin has recently shown at Hotel Maria Kapel, If I Can’t Dance, Kunsthuis Syb, Het HEM, P/////AKT, Joey ramone, Singular Art, W139 and Mutter, among others.