Playing Dead
Exhibition views: Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt 3.12.2025 - 1.2.2023

I suppose there was something to it. The absence of a mark. But then again what had I expected? A single page letter, folded and left tantalizingly gaping on the countertop? It was simply that she was no longer there. It made me proud of her, in my own sick way. The neatness of that departure. The resolve it showed. I took to watching people in airports. Perhaps they would betray to me what education, relations, or drunkenness had not. On the row of bolted-to-the-floor seats across from me sat an older man with an expensive looking watch, head and torso tilted forward in something near the defecatory posture. From the oblique angle at which I looked at him, the ridge of his brow concealed the pits of the eyes, affording the man some privacy from my gaze. The view of his lineaments shone to me with a kind of geologic nakedness. One inviting to my watching. Then a frailer, older looking gent in a reflective yellow vest appeared in the space between us, sweeping the floors into a dustpan with an expression of distant pain. To be humiliated by the smiles and congeniality of strangers. I lingered, caught in that ruinous image, which reminded me perhaps too vividly of the toils of my parents, and when I turned back my gaze, the man with the watch had gone. In his place, another less solidly upper middle class one, was leaning his nose and forehead into steepled fingers. When I returned to the apartment pieces of furniture had gone missing, their contents stacked neatly on the floor. The bookshelf contained odd series of absences that left the remaining titles leaning against each other haphazardly. I spent some days puffing out, trying to fill the space that had been left vacant by expanding my material existence. A process of more or less conscious disorganization. I left a sweater draped across the back of a chair. I placed things in ways that might suggest the everyday disorder of cohabitation. A few days later I found the keys. They had been left inside the electrical cabinet, where they mingled inconspicuously with the other spares.


Tao Iver