Pleasure & Execution | performance view: reading of the texts | photo by Ren Sheikh
Pleasure & Execution | installation view: the ghost story on display | photo by Michiel Teeuw
Pleasure & Execution | performance view | photo by Ren Sheikh | nails by Deniz Bozcuk
Pleasure & Execution, part of MONSTER ARCHIEF, is a performative installation departing from the Faan sodomy processes of 1731. The work departs from a ~30-page booklet of transcripts, in which different suspects confess their acts of sodomy, often with forensic details like place and time, but also with more contextual details (e.g. practicing sodomy directly after going to church). A lot of the confessions were made under circumstances of bodily torture. The artist rewrote the document to the first person, and slightly changed some of the language, fabricating it into a script for monologues. the visibly edited texts could be viewed in an archive box in the church, right by the dividing wall added by the Protestant reformers. Throughout the duration of three days, the artist performed all 24 confessions in a hauntological summoning of the suspects' ghosts. Additionally, they wrote a ghost story, which visitors could request a reading of.