The Performance Art Of Peace

“The Performance Art Of Peace”

 

Installation # 1: “Erotica Of Moral Certainty”

Gaza Strip / Oxford Street Interface

The subject (henceforth identified as Travis) walks through a GSG simulation of Oxford Street. The mannequins in Selfridges wear flak jackets and are posed in attitudes of submission. A child’s face, half-starved by pixelation, is magnified and projected onto the store’s windows.

The recording of a crowd chants “Free Palestine” in Dolby surround into his headset. Travis re-imagines the protest as a neurological event: an epileptic seizure in the cortex of the city.

He takes a screenshot of a discarded placard: Ceasefire Now. The font resembles the signage used in NATO briefings. He files it under [Anti-Semantic Ephemera].

Installation # 2: “Empathy As Auto-Eroticism”

Kyiv / Marble Arch Convergence

The war in Ukraine is being re-staged as a fashion shoot. Models in combat chic pose in the hollowed-out remains of a Central line station. The photographer (wrongly credited as Travis) adjusts the lighting to highlight the mock shrapnel wounds.

Travis himself is aroused by a curiously homo-erotic Reuters image of a soldier cradling a dying comrade.

In nearby Hyde Park, he discovers a discarded Ukrainian flag fluttering beside a rainbow one. Travis notes the juxtaposition: nationalism and identity politics as competing brands. He wonders if grief can be monetized.

Installation # 3: “Protest As Psychosexual Ritual”

Trafalgar Square / Muwasi Hyperlink

It is a sweltering summer of protests that becomes a recurring fever dream. Travis feels naked without his Guy Fawkes mask. Susan (aka the TakTik influencer @SueMe) leads him through a crowd of people in replica national dress, as authentic as avatars. Each holds a QR code linking to a different atrocity. He scans them compulsively, waving his smart-phone like a benediction.

Gaza. Bucha. Aleppo. Ferguson. The images blur into a complex photo-montage: a child with no face, a drone shaped like a crucifix, a politician reading apologies from an autocue.

Susan masturbates him in time with dispersal orders rapped over a hip hop beat. The crowd embraces them.

Installation # 4: “Thermonuclear Democracy”

Westminster / Hamas Dichotomy

Travis watches the BBC’s rolling coverage of Gaza while injecting ketamine. The news anchor’s voice has the same modulation as his mother’s reading him bedtime stories about Narnia.

He intercuts the footage with clips from A Clockwork Orange. The result is indistinguishable from reality.

He constructs a diorama: a miniature of Westminster Bridge, populated by action figures dressed as paramedics and riot police. He sets it on fire and films the melting plastic, while affecting a narration as sonorous as a Public Service Announcement

Installation # 5: “Entropy Without Consequence”

Battersea / Voznytskyi Fluxus

Travis enters the Tate Modern and finds it decorated as a UN refugee camp. The exhibitions are interactive: visitors simulate drone strikes, negotiate ceasefires and experience PTSD via role play and dramatic reconstructions. A child with a prosthetic hand offers him a pamphlet: How to Grieve in 4K.

He lies down beneath a recursive projection of the Thames, which ebbs and flows with blood and hash-tags. Susan joins him and whispers, “When art is inspired by atrocity, it becomes atrocious.”

Travis replies: “We have to curate our own individual apocalypse.”

Installation # 6: “The Diplomacy Of Flesh”

Little St James / Elmendorf-Richardson Palimpsest

Travis watches the Trump–Putin summit unfold on twenty screens in a derelict branch of Currys. The footage morphs endlessly: Putin presenting a map of Ukraine smeared with lipstick; Trump nodding, eyes glazed, as if sedated by applause. The summit is staged like a wedding. Travis notes the choreography: two men exchanging vows, presided over by the corpse of a Zelensky decoy.

In an adjacent PC World, a hologram of Ghislaine Maxwell adjusts her pearls. Epstein’s voice plays through hidden speakers, monotonously reciting names from a list. Travis overlays the summit’s soundtrack with a narration of Maxwell’s trial transcripts. The result is indistinguishable from an episode of Love Island.

He constructs a diptych: In Panel A, Trump and Epstein exchange brochures for resorts outside the jurisdiction of the United Nations. In Panel B, Maxwell and Putin exchange forged passports with amended dates of birth.

Installation # 7: “Ambiguity of Elite Psychosis”

New Hampshire / Novo-Ogaryovo Correspondence

Travis walks the Leake Street tunnel, imagining it as a neural corridor between two hemispheres: Trump’s ego and Putin’s id. He sees classified documents rendered as graffiti. A childish depiction of a tank becomes horribly phallic. The scrawl of tags provides a blueprint for sedition.

He muses about Mar-A-Lago as a metaphor for sovereign immunity. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion as a consulate of forbidden desire. Travis wonders if diplomacy is merely the eroticization of power; consent manipulated through status.

He studies a photo of Trump whispering to Putin. Their faces poised as if about to share a kiss.

Installation # 8: “The Mechanism of Uninformed Dissent”

Al-'Awja / Dnieper Confluence

Travis attends a replica protest in London. The recycled placards read No More War and Justice for Survivors. He imagines the crowd as a jury, the city as a courtroom, the sky as an impartial judge.

He sees Maxwell’s face projected onto Big Ben. Epstein’s silhouette flickers across the façade of Buckingham Palace.

He constructs a model of Downing Street using obsolete drone components and shredded subpoenas. He populates it with figurines of world leaders, each wired to electrodes. He stimulates negotiations by applying voltage. The figures twitch, nod and smile with more animation than their real counterparts.

Installation # 9: “Deviance As An Unverified Meme”

Pennsylvania / Caucasus Termination

In what is either a dream or an AI deepfake, Travis merges Trump with Epstein. The hybrid figure wears a red tie and silk robe. Putin becomes Maxwell, poised and elegant, reclining on a chaise longue. They attempt to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine while consulting an antique map of Gaza drawn in 1948.

Travis wakes in his artist studio, surrounded by protest flyers, VPN sales leaflets and redacted court sketches, crumpled and stained with crusts of dry semen.

Susan prods him with her selfie stick. “Say peace,” she says. “Peace!” they chorus and their filtered smiles ascend into the Cloud.

Installation # 10: “Banality Of Surveillance Iconography”

Ocean Plaza / Khan Yunis Campaign

Travis confronts a static baton charge of mannequins dressed in riot gear, beneath the gaze of one of the lion statues in Trafalgar Square, whose eyes have been replaced with CCTV cameras, which whir and rotate and focus on the otherwise deserted scene.

The protests have ended. Or paused. Or metastasized to other locations. He catalogues the remnants: An illegible placard, bleached by sun and soaked with rain, folded like the wing of a crashed Sukhoi Su-24. A child’s abandoned shoe with the Resolute RGL logo drawn in biro. A Banksy stenciled on the base of Nelson’s column, partially erased by municipal cleaning fluid.

Something crunches beneath his feet. He has stepped on a toy telescope, half hidden under a wilted sunflower. Not all events are connected, he supposes.

*

(Observations of the subject are suspended pending the investigation of a ‘friendly fire’ incident, for which the IDF and Spetsnaz are both claiming responsibility. Travis is one of many artists listed as missing following a missile strike on the Walled Off Hotel, which is designated as a legitimate terrorist target.)