I'll be your Barbie if...

'The ascent from the human body to the work of art and from the work of art to the Idea must take place under the shadow of the whip.' (Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty)

I'll be your Barbie if... is a living and evolving installation culminating in a one-on-one, durational performance. The spectator-participant is invited into a female masochist's dreamworld, where anything can happen, but all decisions are yours. Mixing hello-kitty-kitsch-chic with S&M props, this dark post-feminist imagining asks its visitors to engage in a very intimate interaction with the prostrate female body before them. Inspired by von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, and Deleuze's subsequent reading of the novel, this performance asks how the participant encounters the female body, and the double-face of the female masochist: a space where female and male is fused, the symbolic and the sensual are confused, and where the puppet and the puppeteer merge. How will you fare in this interaction, who will come out on top, and what are the consequences of your decisions within the space?

A durational one-on-one performance first presented at RCSSD, July 2011.