1st performance: 2019, A Chair Walks Into a House, Gallery Paradne, home gallery in The Hague, NL
2nd performance: 2023, part of group exhibition Flowers at Room Temperature, De Studio, Anterp Art Weekend, BE, curated by Anna Laganovska.
Through the GUNDE Chair performance the artist articulates narratives departing from associating their body to that of the mass produced foldable chair GUNDE by IKEA.
The foldable body of the chair allows it, like a biological opposable thumb, to move and do things that non-foldable chairs cannot do.
The artist unfolds the many imaginative and physic possibilities between their body, voice and that of GUNDE.
A multitude of GUNDE is then introduced to further complicate and mathematically enlarge the possibilities at play. From placing the chairs conversing among their similar or against their different (pre-existing domestic furniture)to taking rigid poses, becoming passers-by and by-standers, or enacting anthropomorphic iconic scenes such as sex and funeral.
In the next level, the performance builds on looking at structural (and semantic) possibilities between one and a collective GUNDE body and how it articulates linguistically (following laws of repetition and variation, proximity and distance) and physically (following laws of gravity, reaction to dynamic force, etc.).
The GUNDE approach of unfolding possibilities starts to put into question the mass produced, repeated and isomorphic realities around the individual, and how their isomorphism coexists with the diversity and aperiodicity of their encounter with individuals (thus the context inherently changing and unfolding isomorphism in emergence of relational diversity of which the individual is the master).
The 7 Ikea GUNDE chairs, main protagonists of this journey alongside the artist, are still the artist' possession and oftentimes used simply as extra seating for guests.