A Body Without Its Flesh, Benjamin Francis’ next instalment in his iterative research, consists of an installation with sculptures and props that function as the stage for performances on the opening day, 30 April. The artist 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 learned to distinguish right from wrong, the artist questions how those systems came into existence and who holds the position to dictate those binary oppositions.

During his performances on 30 April, Benjamin invites visitors to enter the installation and take on the role of the teacher in front of a class of four ‘students’, with the artist performing as the teacher's assistant, while reciting a scripted text. It refers to dogma’s around art and the art world and has been run through Google Translate multiple times, causing errors that need to be negotiated while reading it out loud. 

By taking inspiration from the quintessential spaces for education, control and discipline, Benjamin fleshes 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 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 and correction.

The installation shows us something like the aftermath of subjecting the body continuous to corrections and the implications they have on the body. Benjamin says: “Cleaning gets rid of stains, but they also leave marks when you’re rubbing for too long.” With the project A Body Without Its Flesh, the artist aims at subverting the status quo; leaving space for error, mending the wounds the disciplinary methods left behind and allowing our torn skin to heal.

Benjamin Francis graduated from the fine arts programme at ArtEZ BEAR in Arnhem in 2020. This project is part of a longer running research into the non-harmonic chords and errors that evolved from Benjamin Francis’s interest in dance rehearsals. He sees the ballet room as a space where the bodies obey and disobey in order to create a perspective which differs from the participating body to the spectators' point of view. The performers master the script and transcend it by giving the viewers the illusion they are floating above the stage, but only from the perspective of the situated audience. He investigates the topic of the body and the space by means of repetition, decay, cleansing and errors derived from pedagogic structures and power relations. Benjamin Francis has recently shown his work at Secondroom, P/////AKT,  Het HEM, W139 and This art fair.

*During his residency-periode, Benjamin Francis will use the installation as the setting for a performance film under the same title, to be post-produced and released at a later date.

Made possible with help of: Mondriaan Fonds, Gemeente Hoorn and Amarte Fonds.