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"R. thinking about overpopulation" #3 Donation

One motive of this performance is splendor. The gesture of donation creates always an atmosphere of splendorousness: it's connected to Christmas ( donation as one of the main sacral aspects of Christianity) or sensual and splendorous feasts, donation is connected also to sponsorship, political acts, money transfer or giving food to the poorest. Therefore the Russian artist group AES made a few years ago a billboard with the slogan "Help is Violence". What we could see was a boot kicking somebody lying on the ground. Help as a demonstration of power. There's one exception, when the donator doesn't need to posses anything outside his body to give something, and this is blood donation. (Or to be exact what he needs is health, also connected to wealth.) But theoretically it is a pre-capitalist and archaic gesture of physical splendorousness. At the same time blood and all its threatening, rough or sacral symbolic and aesthetical values are tamed down and melt in this situation, what remains are some drops falling into a tiny plastic bag.

So far about splendor and donation, but who is lying under me, is Arafat, or to be exact one of his media icons. Each political event is presented by certain pictures or faces to be reproduced and omnipresent in the world, that they become political icons, the images of the event. One of these political icons was the icon of " Evil Arab Man" to be presented by Bin Laden. Arafat needs to put himself into an absurd position for a politician while he makes effort to create the "contra-icon" of "Good Arab Man". My work comments this picture with a light provocative gesture: a real life reproduction of the media-print. The art-work is constructed by the small mistakes of my " personal reproduction", one of these mistakes is my gender, which doesn't fit (being a woman), then my more or less fitting national identity being of Hungarian-Arab origins, and then the formal artistic moment of using my image and the ego of the artist, which is in this situation very much connected to orthodox and Yugoslav tradition of performance art and the work of my friends.