Orchidelirium - Designated Entrance
2022
Durational performative intervention
exhibition guard, spectators, three entrances of the pavilion, the guard’s costume
Produced by Post Theater Collective and Estonian Center for Contemporary Arts
Razavi’s work begins outside of the Dutch pavilion, where the audience, initially unaware, enters into a system of categorization. The emblematic front door of the Rietveld Pavilion is shut, and a guard dressed in an herbarium vest, instructs visitors, one by one, to enter by either of the two side doors. In Dutch colonial architecture, as well as in Estonian manor houses, class divisions are inscribed spatially and the servant class is physically separated and made invisible.[1] The two side entrances of the pavilion offer separate routes of the exhibition, mimicking those built to establish distinction. One group will be given access to an elevated platform, and the other enters the pavilion from the ground. If the Venice Biennale acts as an exclusive zone of privilege for a cultural elite, the performance re-enacts these processes through a spatial and performative intervention. A bureaucratic policing gaze, usually accompanied by underlying racial and class profiling prevails in zones of surveillance, airports, train stations, embassies, and representative national pavilions.
