On the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Angharad Williams will show her new performance Eraser on two dates, which is developed in collaboration with Richard Sides. The script is based on Williams´ prose text of the same name that will be published alongside the exhibition. Its main protagonist undergoes different transformations via psychic and physical transferences with elementary forces—involving a trout and a magpie, among other things—that unsettle the idea of the “stable” self. Here, a desire to give herself up to these forces turns sensuality into a dysfunctional perversion that reveals mechanisms of power, submission, and hierarchy at play in the human outlook of the world. The way in which capitalism defines subject-object relations primarily in terms of ownership limits our ability to imagine other forms of interpersonal and interspecies encounter; Williams’ piece in contrast proposes a perspective in which the categorical distinctions between individual self, others, and non-human life slowly begin to dissolve. Other worlds of consciousness—of animals, plants, and organic matter—here embody a form of social organization free from the hierarchies of tradition and liberal progress. Eraser, as text, connects closely to the exhibition and echoes its senses of an unstable world, isolation, and social separation, while emphasizing the urgency of encounters with and care for other beings.

The performance will take place in English.