PARTICIPANT INC presents the concluding iteration of a twelve-year, multi-site project, Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (PREMIERE). THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (TPO) merges different media to generate a movie in real time, participating in a larger debate about labor conditions and subjectivity. As a whole, the project seeks to query the limits of film, performance, sculpture, and installation by deploying dissent as a tool to rewrite dominant narratives and open future horizons.
THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE functions as an art project, an archive, and a platform for public events. In addition to an archival exhibition within the exhibition, writer and curator Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman conceived a website-archive that will occupy the online platform PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK. Developed over the course of the exhibition as a living archive, the site catalogs the artist’s material and research oeuvre, indexing the mutual shaping that has transpired between the artist and the project — marking how Barrio has changed with and for the project and highlighting ephemera most relevant to those changes. Referencing the filing cabinets or stacks of a physical archive, the site’s navigation points to subqueries or topics that link to its constitutive elements.