ADHD Penetration, 2018
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performance Jessica Andrey Bogush, Ewa Dziarnowska, Liina Magnea, Billy Morgan, & Maciej Sado
music KILBOURNE & elle hong [umami goddess™]
costume Franziska Acksel
VIXIA camcorder, silicone dildo, Oakley sunglasses, hair extensions, bald cap, ViDi action cam, self color-changing egg
In ADHD Penetration, virtual selves step offscreen, emerging from the fog of a post-apocalyptic rave. Equipped with sunglasses to shield vision from darkness, bodies carry devices of capture, namely: the (dildo-)phallus and the camcorder. Penetrating “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” as both a diagnosis and extrapolated condition of the 21st century elicits an act of coitus as well as a deconstruction of attention and velocity within the body. Offline and live-streaming to unseeable futures, the work empathizes for a world’s fresh flesh consumed by YouTube clip loops, Adderall, and a “selfie”-identity surveilled between architectures of the profile, the club, and (some) doggies(-style).
The performance was premiered as part of Dirty Debüt’s third edition, “Snickers,” at Sophiensæle – with a short screen-interlude featuring Elliott Cennetoglu. (Documentation images © Dorothea Tuch & Telémachos Alexiou [Sophiensæle], Paula Reissig [Performing Arts Festival Berlin], Isabel Machado Rios [Fuchsbau Festival, Hanover], and Samira Mosca [MUSEION, Bolzano]; non-participatory documentation video © Diethild Meier.) Documentation of the work, accompanied by/with a performed reaction-video featuring Harald Stojan, was live-streamed during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of Borderless for Reconnect Festival (Tehran) and Ejercicios de apertura for Perfolink (Santiago).
“ADHD Penetration is, as one would say on Twitter, a Big Mood. As post-whatever as it might be, it is to me first and foremost moving in all its irony and post-irony. As signaled by the title and by a whole set of stylistic choices, these affective layers though are so impressive not least because they are always connected within their cultural framework. As in the outside world, for example, it’s not at all subtle how there’s always a video camera involved in the actions on stage. What will happen with this footage, what other audience is this for? And the pills the performers are swallowing evoke both Skittles or Adderall and their respective industries – either way, a significant high. Rather than being about the psychiatric-industrial complex, though, ADHD Penetration is playing with its feelings. And is also played by them. Is this a shift, is it a critique, reflection, reproduction? At the risk of being too cool for school, ADHD Penetration mobilizes an ambivalence in not knowing yet. Sianne Ngai, for whom cuteness is one of the aesthetic categories of the times we call our times, writes of it that it’s ‘not just an aestheticization but an eroticization of powerlessness, evoking tenderness for small things but also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish them further.’ Eroticization of powerlessness in the face of how good it can feel – in the face of how bad it feels, too – is certainly a theme.”
— Maxi Wallenhorst
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