ACHA worked with performance artist and choreographer David Thomson as an architectural-visual design consultant in connection with Venus, the third and final part of a multimedia performance work by Thomson comprising an integrated meditation on race, gender, and sexual identity (boundaries) in American society through the lens of voyeurism. Underlying these investigations is an interrogation of the concepts of freedom and surrender, questioning how we perceive their meaning and value as states of power.

The project incorporates an examination of the artifice and performance of “identity.” As a society in “identity flux,” the ideas of identity are transforming and moving to individual concepts of power and self-identification. The Thomson-Höcek design collaboration of sets examines the contradictions embedded in these ideas and actions, through distorted constructs that accentuate the discordances and tensions of bodies and space within the performance.

Venus, is a transgressive gender fluid blackface hero/ine and catalyst within an installation-performance setting.  Named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman, an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris, this character is layered with references to black face, gender ambiguity and coupled with the incongruities of dominance, vulnerability, erasure and visibility using the visual and cultural iconography of four objects: a latex mask, black high heels, a white flowing dress and Thomson’s naked black body underneath -- a ‘mythological beast’ who references the myth of Venus and in turn the perceptions of beauty, love and sexuality.

The audience is mobile, able to come and go from a week-long multi-media performance installation that is open for viewing 3-4 hours per day, echoing the exhibition that held the original Hottentot Venus.