Interlude III

Horny Nostalgia series

Installation and durational performance

Duration: 2 hours

Interlude III explores the collision between childhood nostalgia, homosexual desire and the theatrical absurdity of erotic entertainment. Drawing upon the familiar imagery of cartoon ghosts, the work transforms a figure associated with childhood innocence and supernatural threat into an unlikely performer of adult sexual spectacle.

Within a deliberately artificial installation, a figure concealed beneath a white ghost costume performs a two-hour dance around a pole. The familiar conventions of erotic entertainment are disrupted by the ridiculousness of the costume, transforming an act traditionally associated with seduction into something awkward, humorous and deliberately unconvincing.

The ghost's disguise becomes central to this contradiction. Intended to conceal the body, the white sheet instead exaggerates its physical presence, creating an unstable relationship between anonymity and exposure. The performer becomes simultaneously an object of desire, a cartoon character and an absurd theatrical figure.

Through the duration of the performance, repetition and physical endurance begin to undermine the promise of erotic spectacle. What might initially appear playful or seductive becomes an extended exercise in futility, where the labour of maintaining the performance exposes the artificiality of the erotic conventions it imitates.

Accompanied by moving images and a deliberately theatrical environment, the installation blurs the boundaries between performance, sculpture and popular culture. Neither frightening nor convincingly erotic, the ghost occupies a space in which the visual languages of horror, pornography and childhood entertainment fail to sustain themselves.

As part of Horny Nostalgia, Interlude III embraces the camp failure of erotic subversion, using humour, repetition and the performing male body to question the relationship between desire, nostalgia and the construction of masculine sexuality.