When do everyday gestures become performative? What makes them enter the realm of magic? “Five Daily Rituals” derives from subconscious memories of watching women in my household carrying out various household tasks, attentively aware of their hand gestures. For me, working with everyday objects is a practice of remembering. Through visceral interventions of domestic materials, Five Daily Rituals interrogates the peculiar intimacy of being-with-home and being-at-home. In each video I wear a different pair of gloves while performing a set routine; reminiscent of household chores, but in my rendering, the chores become nonsensical. Invested in humourous and absurd articulations of the mundane, the performer is suspended in the imagination of discursive materials moving through multitudes of contingency, calling into question the collapsing notions of value. The viewer’s experience becomes a split between the sensorial encounter of familiar objects, and its assertive removal from the real. In the gestures of spill, spell and slippage, we are dissolved in a sense of idleness. This proposes and exposes the experience of slowed-down time and economy, while raising doubts on our perpetual desire for self-discipline and utility.

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