To be King at the Iwalewahaus, Germany

July 07, 2022 - July 07, 2022

To Be King is informed by the essay 'Las Meninas' which Michel Foucault published in 1966 as the first chapter to his book The Order of Things. Foucault in his description of the painting by Velasquez suggests (amongst other things) that is through language, the taxonomy of the day, that things are ordered. This order, particular yet tenuous, is dependent on who is control of the gaze, who is 'king'.

To Be king situates itself as a destabilizing narrative in which the king is 'dethroned'. Positioning characters and spaces from the periphery in the place from which the dominant gaze originates points to the possibility of a different order of things and highlights the fragility of the established and dominant order.



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