CP / 2023
︎︎︎ Watch out ︎︎︎
Digital self-portraits produced in technical collaboration with Barbara Salomé felguenhauer
ADAM
Uniforms are regulated and contractualised, they unite the team, they are a work tool and a vector of efficiency that has an impact on employee productivity. The lower the worker is in the hierarchy, the stricter, more complete and more defined the uniform - a profound marker of class at work. In 2022, the sociologist Monique Pinçon Charlot, working on the dominant elites, spoke of the need to "demonstrate in places of power". Art is a place of power, and its history has been shaped in part by commissions from patrons, churches and heads of state. I have hijacked 4 works of art representing these dominant powers, parodying them with the technical clothing of employees in several sectors of activity. Using parody, caricature and satire, which were the first means of expressing social and wage struggles, is an effective way of addressing the invisibility of workers.
I spent a large part of my life in uniform as an employee in luxury hotels, and it became necessary for me to unravel the feelings of anger and submission I felt in the face of a hierarchical and arbitrary environment that seemed to me to have no window of escape.
DAVID LOUIS NAPOLEON
Exhibition view, Eleven Steen, Brussels June 2023
Exhibition view, Eleven Steen, Brussels June 2023