The Destruction Of Experience

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The Destruction Of Experience is a solo show by Amalia Ulman that took place @ Evelyn Yard (London) in October 2014

My body, my glands, the State, this state of mind that I’m in, right here, right now, because of the Levonelle or Next Choice or Plan B. Ticking the boxes of all the possible side effects that the pharma-cis-(t)-male in the cubicle considered as virtual.
Because the female body is a virtual construction suffered in silence.

Time, ageing, becoming an object and not being allowed to age. Stretch marks and biological clocks. The faux documentary on Justin Bieber’s forehead explains it well: just as expression lines are appropriated from women, forehead lines become a masculine trait as they signify experience. OBP.

How much pain is a normal amount of pain. Nausea and Diarrhea are a girl’s thing.
You can buy second generation progestin at Morrisons for 25£ or go to the pharmacy and get it for free. They will ask you a set of questions, though. The world is reluctant to grant you that wish, bitch. That wish being to avoid the humiliation of morning after’s interrogation.

Calendars are signifiers of death; objects that are perishable from the day they’ve been designed.
A clear principle in the history of calendar making is that those in power make the calendar. A key sign of sovereignty is the power to declare a holiday. Calendars negotiate between the heavens and the state, and orient us to time and eternity. Years and days mimic the classic religious function of providing a meaningful orientation to the universe.

The show presents a narrative, through calendars and clocks, about primitive accumulation and the female body as instrument for the reproduction of labor and the expansion of the workforce. Humanity. The series of 12 prints exhibit the same calendar displayed in different pages. One calendar with its twelve pages designed under the effects of the Levonelle pill.
In the stairs, the clocks hold self-portraits generated by the app “Oldify” referencing the process of ageing in relation to the beauty myth. Next to the toilet there is the Love Scale, which is a Pain Scale, which is a Love scale.

Let’s walk towards the altar, what do we see. Dr. Marijn Dekkers stares at us from his digitally printed memorabilia, from the heart-shaped jigsaw. The melodic instrumentals my Chinese masseuse recommended to me, caress our ears while the jazzy beats from the Zara Home compilation, coming from the other room, the “waiting room”, gives us a migraine. That Jazzy Nausea.

Reaching the Nirvana through Kurt Cobain’s self sacrifice; understanding life by using Justin Bieber as an exemplary martyr.
Nirvana refers to the imperturbable stillness of mind after the fires of desire, aversion, and delusion have been finally extinguished, that stillness that comes with the destruction of time. The destruction of Experience.

Flower-shaped Yungdrung symbols and the sickening smell of the artificial Fresh Linen scent. The fabrication of a place of exception in the shape of that bland cross over between a surgery room, a waiting room of a sexual health clinic of the NHS, a community church, a temple, a hospital. Aesthetic that is characterized by its ‘sublime ordinariness’.