MY HAPPINESS DEPENDS ON YOU

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performance video

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As a doubled figure inspired by Dolly Parton, the performers sit on a box with an inbuilt flatscreen. The screen displays a streaming video of a multiplayer online shooter game by Dr. Disrespect. Seated above the gaming character, the two performers wear wedding gowns, long wavy blonde wigs, eccentric makeup, and grotesquely oversized fake breasts, evoking a sense of female monstrosity. They hold begging bowls typically used for church collections. From time to time, they hauntingly bleat in unison: “My happiness depends on you!” (a line from Dolly Parton’s Jolene). As they do, they stare intensely – fiercly, expectantly –into the eyes of individual visitors. While the streaming video evokes a nostalgic desire for the heroic, the two Dolly-figures question heroism itself. If the heroic traditionally relies on the self-sacrifice of a singular, strong (male) individual for the sake of an ideology, a (feminist) response might be a turn toward interdependence. In this light, the sentence “My happiness depends on you” could be read, positively, as an anti-heroic invocation – or, negatively, as voluntary submission. It thus points at the ambivalent relationship between dependency and independency.

My Happiness Depends On You was shown at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin for New Cinema and Contemporary Art 2021.