10 Hours of Gomorrah
A happening presented as part of Outside Festival in Kyiv, bringing performance and contemporary art into the festival’s music programme. Four participants read excerpts from the Marquis de Sade in a staged, intimate setting, making freedom, desire and moral limits part of a shared experience.
The work is dated 2020 in the artist’s portfolio; the festival presentation is listed in the archive under 2021.
About the project
Conceived as a homage to the Marquis de Sade and Federico Fellini, 10 Hours of Gomorrah brought literary provocation into a live, collective situation. Reading became a form of performance, shaped by the participants’ voices, the staged surroundings and the presence of an audience.
BDSM clothing designer Egor Bashtovenko, director and artist Yevhen Korshunov and other participants read passages from Philosophy in the Boudoir. The text’s insistence on sexual freedom provided a point of departure for the happening. Presented within Outside Festival, the work brought these questions into a contemporary music setting, allowing a historically provocative text to be encountered through theatrical action and physical presence.