I have learned that the work does not live where people assume it lives.
People think the work lives on the wall. In the white room. Under the spotlight. In a clean photograph. In a finished post. In the moment when someone points and says, this is it.
But my work has always lived in movement. It lives in the shift from one place to another. It lives in the hesitation before something is shown. It lives in the quiet after it is taken down. It lives in the hand that carries it. It lives in the room that rejects it. It lives in the conversation that misquotes it. It lives in the silence that follows it.
That is why I keep replacing the work.
Not because I cannot decide where it belongs, but because I am not interested in one permanent position. A fixed position makes people lazy. A fixed position makes meaning too confident. A fixed position lets the world claim the work too easily. I want the work to stay slightly unowned. Slightly unsettled. I want it to keep asking, where am I now, and what does this place do to me.
When I say (re)place, I mean I place the work again and again, as if placement is not a final step but a living part of the piece. I treat placement like a pulse. Like breathing in and out. Sometimes I put the work in a room. Sometimes I put it in a message. Sometimes I put it in someone else’s hands. Sometimes I place it in a gap, so what you meet is not the object, but the absence where it should have been.
And then there is the other half of this statement. The half that sounds like a contradiction on purpose.
I also unperform labor.
People do not only want the artwork. They want to see you working. They want the visible effort. The studio photo. The progress video. The daily proof. The story of sacrifice. They want the artist to look busy in a way that can be understood quickly. They want labor to be displayed like a badge, so the work feels earned.
I have a complicated relationship with that. Because I do work. I work constantly, even when I am silent. Even when nothing is posted. Even when no one can point to an output.
But I do not want to perform that labor as entertainment.
I do not want to be watched like a factory.
I do not want my exhaustion to become content.
So I unperform it. I remove the performance of productivity from the surface. I let the labor hide where it is truest: inside planning, waiting, thinking, rearranging, refusing, returning. Inside emotional effort. Inside the private negotiations that no one applauds.
This is what connects (re)placing the work with (un)performing labor. In both cases, I am resisting the demand for a single clear display. I am resisting the idea that art must be easily located and labor must be easily proven. I am resisting the hunger to reduce everything into something the world can measure.
Because some of the most important work I do cannot be measured without destroying it.
I want to tell you what this looks like in my life, in a human way, without turning it into theory.
Sometimes replacing the work is literal. I move it. I take it down. I put it somewhere else. I test a corner, then I change the corner. I change the height, the distance, the light. I watch how the room changes the piece, and how the piece changes the room.
I have learned that a room is not neutral. Every room has a voice. Some rooms are loud, full of demands. Some rooms are polite but controlling. Some rooms feel like they swallow things. Some rooms treat art like decoration. Some rooms treat art like a threat.
So I listen.
I place the work, and I listen to what the space does to it. Does the space make it smaller. Does it make it louder than it should be. Does it flatten the tension. Does it turn it into a product. Does it turn it into a symbol. Does it make it feel dead.
If the place kills it, I move it.
I do not mean that I only want perfect spaces. I mean I do not want spaces that steal the work’s dignity. There is a difference between difficulty that deepens a piece and difficulty that turns it into a prop.
Sometimes I replace the work because I realize it is being used. Not respected. Used.
Used as a proof of someone else’s taste. Used as a token. Used as a decoration for a social image. Used as a cultural stamp. Used as an item that is present to fill a hole.
When I sense that, I feel a heat in my chest. Not anger like violence, but anger like grief. And I start to imagine the work leaving. I imagine it stepping off the wall, quietly, like a person who has been invited to a party where nobody is actually listening to them.
So I replace it. I move it away from the place that is using it and into a place that can hold its silence.
Sometimes replacing the work is not physical. It is about context.
I have learned that context can be a cage. The moment the work enters a fixed narrative, people stop encountering it. They start repeating what they were told. They become proud of understanding. They become sure. And sure is often the enemy of feeling.
So I shift the context. I let the work appear in one form and then later appear again in a different form. A different scale. A different sequence. A different framing. The same piece might be a quiet object in one room and a loud absence in another. It might be seen as fragile in one place and aggressive in another. It might be read as personal in one context and political in another, without me forcing it.
This is not manipulation. It is honesty. Because the work is not one thing. The work is a relationship. And relationships change depending on where you meet.
Sometimes I place the work in a conversation instead of a gallery. I send one image to one person and let it live there, privately. No audience, no applause. Just the risk of being seen by one set of eyes. That can be more intense than an exhibition. Because in a private encounter, there is nowhere to hide behind crowd energy. It is just you and the other person’s reaction.
Sometimes I place the work in a pause. I promise something will be shown and then I hold it back. Not as a trick, but as a way of making the audience aware of their own desire. Desire to see. Desire to consume. Desire to finish the experience quickly. In that holding back, the work begins to exist as anticipation. As frustration. As imagination. And imagination is not weaker than seeing. Sometimes it is stronger.
Sometimes I place the work in administrative spaces. Emails. Forms. Requests. Permissions. The boring corridors where art is usually treated as paperwork. I have learned that those corridors are full of power. They decide what can happen and what cannot happen. They decide who is welcomed and who is blocked. When I place the work there, I am not trying to be clever. I am trying to show that the system is part of the artwork’s reality, whether we like it or not.
And sometimes I place the work in disappearance. I remove it. I let it be missing. I let people look for it and not find it. The absence becomes a sculpture made of expectation. The missing piece becomes a mirror, showing what the viewer assumes should be there.
All of this is labor, by the way.
Replacing the work takes labor. Emotional labor, logistical labor, mental labor.
But it is not the kind of labor people applaud. It does not photograph well. It does not make a good story. It is mostly invisible.
That is where (un)performing labor comes in.
In the art world, labor is often performed like a ritual. People want to see the artist as a worker, always producing, always sweating, always proving. It becomes part of the value. Not only the piece, but the suffering behind it.
I refuse that performance. I refuse to treat my own tiredness as a currency.
I have done the work of explaining myself too many times. Explaining my choices, explaining my silences, explaining my methods, explaining my identity, explaining why the work does not arrive in a predictable way.
And at some point, I realized that explanation can become unpaid labor that never ends. It can become a second job on top of the making. A job where the artist is required to be polite, clear, inspiring, grateful, always available. A job where you have to package your inner life into something that can be easily digested.
That is a kind of extraction.
So I started unperforming it.
I still do the labor, but I do not display it the way the system expects. I do not always show the process. I do not always show the struggle. I do not always narrate myself in real time.
Sometimes I work quietly for weeks and the only visible result is one small gesture. One short text. One image. One absence.
People can interpret that as laziness if they want. But what I know is that my labor is not always visible and my labor is not always productive in the capitalist sense.
Some days, my labor is waiting until the work feels honest.
Some days, my labor is not sending the message that would damage a relationship.
Some days, my labor is deciding not to accept a context that will flatten the work.
Some days, my labor is letting a project die because forcing it would be violence.
That is labor too. It is decision labor. Boundary labor. Integrity labor.
It costs something.
I want to speak emotionally now, because this is not only about art strategy. This is about being a human being with limits.
There are times when I feel guilty for not being constantly present. Guilty for not replying quickly. Guilty for not posting. Guilty for not feeding the machine. There are times when I feel fear that my silence will make me invisible in the worst way. The kind of invisibility where people forget you exist.
And then I remember why I do it.
I do it because performing labor can become a way of losing yourself. You start working for the image of the artist instead of working for the work itself. You start doing what will be seen instead of what is true.
And I am trying to stay true.
That is hard. It is not romantic. It is not always peaceful. Sometimes it feels like standing in a storm, holding something fragile, refusing to drop it even when your hands hurt.
Unperforming labor is my way of protecting the fragile thing.
It is my way of saying, I will not turn my entire life into proof.
And replacing the work is my way of protecting the fragile thing too.
Because the work is not safe everywhere. Some contexts swallow it. Some audiences want to own it too quickly. Some structures want to translate it into a slogan.
So I move it. I place it again. I place it elsewhere. I place it in a way that keeps it alive.
Sometimes I think the real artwork is not the object at all. It is the movement around it.
The choice to show. The choice not to show. The choice to delay. The choice to withdraw.
The way the work travels between bodies. Between rooms. Between screens. Between institutions. Between misunderstandings.
The way it gets carried like a secret for a while.
That traveling is not smooth. It is awkward. It is heavy. It is sometimes lonely.
When you keep replacing the work, you also keep restarting the conversation. You keep stepping into uncertainty. You keep risking that the new place will not hold the piece. You keep risking that people will not understand why you moved it. You keep risking that you will be called difficult.
And yes, sometimes I am difficult.
But I am not difficult because I enjoy power. I am difficult because I want to stay close to what feels honest. And honesty does not always fit into the clean schedules and clean narratives people prefer.
This is where I want to talk about care.
Replacing the work is a form of care.
It is me caring enough to ask, is the work being held properly. Is it being heard. Is it being flattened. Is it being used. Is it being respected.
And unperforming labor is also a form of care.
It is me caring enough to protect my energy. My mind. My sensitivity. The part of me that can still make something true.
Because if I become a full time performer of my own productivity, I lose that sensitivity. I become numb. And numbness is not a good material for my practice.
So I choose a slower rhythm. A less visible rhythm. A rhythm that sometimes frustrates people who want faster output.
And I accept that frustration as part of the work.
Not because I want to punish anyone, but because I think our impatience reveals something. It reveals how we have been trained to treat art like content. To scroll, consume, move on. It reveals how we treat artists like service providers.
When I unperform labor, I am gently refusing that training.
I am saying, I am not here to produce endlessly. I am here to make something that can survive your attention.
That survival requires time.
It requires silence.
It requires the courage to not constantly prove yourself.
And that is why the work gets replaced. Because the work must find its conditions, like a plant must find its light.
Sometimes a piece needs a quiet place to be understood. Sometimes it needs a hostile place to show its teeth. Sometimes it needs a private place to remain tender. Sometimes it needs to disappear for a while to become stronger in memory.
So I keep moving it.
I keep replacing it.
Not because I am lost, but because I am listening.
And while I do this, I keep working, but I refuse to act like work is only work when you can watch it.
I refuse to perform my labor like a show.
I do not want my practice to be a stage where I have to prove that I deserve to exist.
I want my practice to be a space where I can breathe and still make something real.
So if you look for the work and it is not where you expected, that may be the point.
If you look for the labor and you do not see it, that may be the point too.
Because I am interested in what remains when the obvious signs are removed.
What remains when the work is not fixed.
What remains when labor is not performed.
What remains when the artist does not behave like a predictable machine.
What remains is something closer to truth.
A truth that is not neat, not constant, not easy to frame, but still deeply human.
And I keep returning to a simple feeling that guides me.
I want the work to be encountered, not consumed.
I want the making to be lived, not displayed.
I want the movement to be part of the meaning.
I want the invisible labor to be honored by my own care, even if no one claps for it.
So I replace the work, again and again, until it finds the place where it can breathe.
And I unperform labor, again and again, until my life stops being a performance and becomes what it should be.
A real person making real work.
Quietly. Stubbornly. With feeling.
That is how I (re)place the work. That is how I (un)perform labor.