LYDIA MCCAIG
Performance (As Persephone), 2023
Performance as Persephone is a recorded performance, in which McCaig inhabits the image of Persephone, from the Greek Myth. McCaig slowly places 6 pomegranate seeds into her mouth before accelerating the action and greedily stuffing them into her mouth, until they begin failing and falling back out. Persephone eats 6 pomegranate seeds, 1 for each month where she must be devoted to Hades. The performative act of ‘stuffing’ or devouring pomegranate seeds by the handful into her mouth communicates desperate desire and the rituals of obsession, through performative physical gestures that are equally located in Greek mythology and personal digital interactions that define many new relationships and encounters.
While at first glance this image suggests an explicitly sexual proposition, this is actually a work that demonstrates the desire for intense devotion and intimacy through physical and sexualised spectacle where longing and lust collide with the gaze, the screen, the personal and the political.