Pushing Up Daisies
Installation at Open Studios, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam, The Netherlands
May 2025
A pamphlet I found on the street poses the question:Do you worry about the fear of death?The question is grammatically specific. The question is not "do you worry about death", but rather:does the fear of death worry you?
This work departs from considering the fear of death as a symptom of Western society, where medicalization, social stigma, secularization, censorship of genocide, and self-optimization abstract one of the few experiences all living bodies share, with the privilege of time or distance, or through violent interruption.
Theater lights, synchronized to the breaths of a white dog found in a red box and a puppet on a television, fade in and out and travel across a room, casting focus on the objects in it. The objects were made as works of art, which means they will most likely enjoy at least a postponement of death, if not total immortality. How does artistic practice replicate the avoidant tendencies of societies afraid of death? A control room filled with diaristic sketches flickers insecurely. With the prioritization of total control of individual lives, what lessons are missed in maintaining distance with our inevitable end?
In the corner, a quilted wooden stage waits for live intervention. In a series of four performative vignettes that interrupt the exhibition daily, a two-sided puppet serves as a messenger from a threshold between life and death, where they sit in perpetuity.
- -Lili Huston-Herterich
Performances:
- American Yoga, where a puppet has a crisis in a CorePower yoga class.
Towering People, where a puppet describes a dream of two funerals of public figures.
Death Bed, where a puppet describes the way they would like to die.
You Are A Stain, where a puppet sings a song.
