Offerings to Bob Flanagan

Offerings to Bob Flanagan interrogates pain as an endurance performance, incessant conjuring, and connective tissue as both subject and witness. Shot from the perspective of the bedroom, the video proposes the sick bed as a horizon both spatially and temporally, calling upon Tala Khanmalek and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes’s proposition of “bedlife.” The project spans across one year from November 8th 2021 to November 2nd 2022, collecting a year of pain journals, memory recollections, and confessions that mirror Bob Flanagan’s 1995 Pain Journals. The project summons Bob Flanagan as an art historical reference and ghostly figure in conversation with artists and theorists such as Johanna Hedva, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Jasbir Puar, & C. Riley Snorton.

2021–2023
Time: 1 hour 1 minute 17 seconds
Materials: Monitor, speaker, low boy stand, MR 10 chair, leather corseting

Vimeo Link

Photographic Documentation by Neighboring States

A brown leather MR 10 chair with leather corset lacing sits in front of a black monitor and speaker bar sitting on a chrome and orange low boy stand. The image on screen is of a plain bed with white sheets. The yellow subtitles read “with a fist raised as the protest goes on outside,” an homage to Johanna Hedva’s 2016 Sick Woman Theory

Image of a bedroom with a woven green blanket and blue heating pad sprawled across the bed. A small lamp lights up the left hand side in the corner. The yellow subtitles read “I am trying to manage the pain like a good gimp”

A black monitor and speaker bar sit mounted on a chrome and orange low boy stand. On the monitor is a shot of a bed with white sheets, and a woven green weighted blanket. A blue heating pad is obscured by yellow subtitles that read “How I am overworking myself like a rabbit running in circles back the pain pills”

A dark screen with yellow subtitles that read “and the disdain for disabled bodies”