Anatomy of Obstruction is a series of drawings.
Anatomy of Obstruction: in Museum is the version exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. For the Stedelijk exhibition, I composed posters digitally with the scans of the drawings. These framed works are the original drawings in layers. I glued foamboards behind each piece of drawings, layered and suspended them, creating a sense of theatrical depths. As a performer myself, I always want to treat my drawings as scenographic elements. The frames are made by Boris Steiner with meranti wood. With the oiling it became redder and almost fleshy.

Everything started with an invitation from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to visualise the corridor surrounding its historical staircase: seven niches, each measuring three by five metres. I wanted to turn the architecture into a body, with organs in pairs and symmetry, the staircase as the trachea, and an anus / throat in the centre as the opening / exit. Flirting with the overlap between organism and organisation, and combining the anatomical diagrams and organisational flowchart, I shaped the organs into metaphors for imposed systems and bureaucratic processes of filtration, regulation, and legitimation, something external and oppressive. Each organ comes with an irritation or disorder — the obstruction signalling the resistance or dissent from within. I play with the dichotomies of health and illness, self and other, body and foreign. Where are the boundaries of our body, what’s the threshold of an organisation? Can resistance emerge from within the systems that seek to regulate and contain it?