Performance
Presented by Objects of Desire
The performance:
Unidentified deals with Berlin’s sex workers’ relationship that towards the mandatory ProstSchutzG identification cards or ‘whore ID’s’. the 2017 law ProstSchutzG forces sex workers to register their information into a state-run databank and carry around a sex worker identification card, or be forced into illegality. Through a work or stage persona or a double life, sex workers are often veiled behind a facade which deems them ‘mythical’ in the public eye. I’ll be using ‘mythical’ representations of iconic pop culture sex workers to bring out testimonies of sex workers about their relationship to the whore-IDs they have or refuse to have. The performance is set on a backdrop of the changing topography of Berlin’s Sex Work. It seeks to recognize the disappearance of brothels, to highlight the correlation between it and the new law, and to examine Berlin sex work’s new sites of compliance and resistance.
The artist:
Liad Hussein Kantorowicz is a performance artist, activist, and perpetual migrant. Her performances deal with de-exotifying and de-mystifying the positions of so-called sexual or political deviants. In them, the body is used as a tool to transgress the boundaries of the public space, and to call into question the public‘s ‘democratic’ limitations. Her performance work has been presented at the 10th Berlin Biennale, Athens Museum of Queer Arts AMOQA, Kampnagel Hamburg, Transmediale festival Berlin, Ljubljana’s City of Women, Berliner Festspiele, Arcola Theatre London, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kabareet in Haifa/Palestine and more, and in streets, social centers and queer bars in Europe and Palestine-Israel. Her first short film NO DEMOCRACY HERE premiered at CPH:DOX and is currently touring film festivals around the world. Her first EP with her musical partner Kalpour will be released later this year. Liad is a spokesperson for sex workers’ rights and a founder of a Berlin’s peer project for migrant sex workers at Hydra e.V.