F.F.F.F. (2023)

Somehow, amidst the nothingness of everything all-at-once, I missed the opening of Paul Kajander & Isabelle Pauwels's collaborative two-channel HD animation installation at Unit 17 in July. Thankfully shows run for forever, so there's always more time.

Both the exhibition and the artwork are called F.F.F.F., and For Fucking Fuck's sake I won't even begin to spend more than a few minutes on why, because I'll only come up one "F" short. Whatever labour expended on guessing what the "F"s in the title stand for only proves Pauwels's point: that our labour is expected, not valued, and rarely is it remunerated. Everywhere in the world someone owes an artist money. 

There is money in F.F.F.F. A real estate agent, a woman who looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene but is too busy showing houses and harassing those on the sidewalk outside her house to run for public office. The harassed are two lemons -- one voiced by Kajander, the other by Pauwels -- and they happen to be standing near (let's say adjacent to, for Kajander's sake) a bus stop. When the agent suggests it's the bus stop that justifies their being there, the Pauwels Lemon says, "We're not waiting for the bus," and I thought, for fucking fuck's sake, that's Pauwels's genius in a nutshell: when offered an out -- like waiting for a bus --Pauwels's Lemon is like, Why lie? I have every fucking right to be standing in public space, bus stop or not. Fuck you, you fucking fuck. I refuse to "play" "my" "part" in defusing the situation. And in that way, Pauwels's Lemon is not unlike Greene, Trump, or any other American reactionary activated by the likes of Steve Bannon. Yet this Lemon is presented ... sympathetically. Brava! Brava!

But wait, there's more -- 26m15s, to be exact (the video is based on a script by Pauwels, with editorial input from Kajander, Amy Lam and Valérie Pauwels). See this show. It's open through August 27th.