Exhaustion is a performative and video-based project that reflects on the dynamics of a performance-driven society. Developed in response to a personal experience of near-burnout, and informed by Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, the work explores a cultural condition in which individuals function as self-exploiting machines—constantly active, yet never truly progressing. The demand for continuous positivity and productivity generates automatisms: actions performed without reflection, purpose or direction.
A series of absurd and ironic performances confronts the human body with systems built for efficiency and automation. Everyday technologies—escalators, automatic doors, moving walkways—are subverted: ascension occurs on descending machinery, automatic doors are interrupted by bodily presence, and static positions are held on dynamic surfaces. The result is a gesture of resistance within a logic of flow.
Each action is reduced to a minimal set of movements, repeated to the point of exhaustion. The body becomes a site of contradiction—simultaneously integrated in and alienated from the mechanisms that surround it. Occasional exits from the frame evoke an illusion of freedom, while the system imposes adaptation through endless movement.
These performances function as moving photographs: temporal stillness emerges from repetition, challenging the idea of time as linear progress and exposing the absurdity of effort without purpose.
The final piece presents a fixed, idealized image—a perfectly styled figure smiling at the camera for an uninterrupted hour. Initially perceived as a still portrait, the work gradually reveals itself as a looped performance. The prolonged act of smiling becomes an emblem of societal expectation: to appear positive, composed, desirable—always “on.” Displayed like an icon, the piece reflects the aesthetic and behavioral standard imposed by the system it critiques.
