Odalisque // Peter Clough

About

Sculpture, projection, text, live performance, and music come together in an immersive environment that complicates power relations between sub and Dom, viewer and performer, subject and object.

Custom bondage furniture restrains Clough’s body in the position of a classical reclining nude. While his physical body is restrained and his mouth gagged, digital projections of his hands and face, actively moving and speaking, reinscribe his subjectivity and his power. Clough’s words, alternately political, poetic, narrative and analytical, blend seamlessly with music and sound scapes by noise artist Peter Kalisch. A figure representing the Dom, played by performance artist Adam Liam Rose, wears a digitally reproduced mask of Clough’s face. Together, this sensuous and haunting work takes on the seeming contradictions within the queer submissive consciousness: experiencing restraint as comforting, experiencing humiliation as affirming, experiencing exposure as a kind of armor, and experiencing bondage as freedom.

The performance is accompanied by a limited edition zine by Jesse Cline and Peter Clough. The zine features collages made from the source material for the performance, mashups of classical paintings with Clough's collection of bondage porn, alongside the full text from the piece, which can function as both BDSM erotica and as essays on finding empowerment and agency through objectification and submission.