Video Performance 2021

Invited to Bangkok’s Art Biennale 2020/21: Escape Routes, Nezaket Ekici had to complete the arduous journey to Thailand during the peak of the coronavirus. During the mandatory period of hotel isolation from 20.12.2020-4.1.2021, Nezaket Ekici created the Video Performance, “Bangkok Quarantine”, transforming the isolating experience of pandemic confinement into an intimate, existential performance of endurance. Filmed entirely by the artist during her 15-day quarantine in a Bangkok hotel room, the piece documents the erosion of freedom, agency, and sensory experience during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. With only a hand-held camera as companion, Ekici becomes both subject and observer, transforming her hotel room into a site of solitary ritual, daily repetition, and psychological experimentation. In this enclosed cage, life is reduced to its most essential rhythms: eating, moving, waiting, and watching oneself survive. Ekici filmed herself as she constructs a plan for her life inside the small constrictive hotel room. In the beginning, she goes over the rules of quarantine in Bangkok: 15 days, no physical contact or contact of any kind with any other person; the first 7 days are without any outdoor access, whereas during the last 8 days, 45 min of fresh air are permitted per day. Ekici documents her daily routines: from doing exercises such as jump rope and lifting water bottles to showing what she eats. Restricted to a tiny area as if like an animal in a cage, Ekici’s only opportunities to exercise freedom in her body are transformed into a harrowing performance: her walking 10km daily amounts to a maddening, circular pacing of the room; she has no choice over the food she is fed; she must monitor herself for fever and other symptoms. But rather than capitulate to inertia, Ekici responds with quiet defiance. She catalogues her meals, films herself performing mundane routines, and begins to combine and layer her clothing in inventive ways. Fashion becomes a form of rebellion—a tactile and visual liberation in a world stripped of texture and variation. Whereas the vlog format typically celebrates a curated, aspirational version of daily life, Ekici subverts it: here, documentation becomes a mode of survival. A record not of productivity, but of presence. Not of narrative arc, but of one woman suspended in one location, the whole world within one room. At its core, “Bangkok Quarantine” offers a profound meditation on what it means to be human when stripped of contact, spontaneity, and freedom. The body becomes a site of negotiation—between obedience and expression, between vulnerability and resilience. Ekici’s performance resists spectacle and instead asks viewers to sit in the discomfort of stillness, to reflect on how the structures meant to protect life can also confine it. The video does not dramatize despair; rather, it captures something quieter and perhaps more difficult: the endurance of the human spirit in a vacuum of meaning. (text: Jono Wang Chu)

Costumes, Daily Items, Food, Water

15 Day Performance. Duration of the Video: HD MP4 16:24 min. sound, colour

Camera, Editing, Sound: Nezaket Ekici