If performance is a form of power that, in contemporary society, legitimizes knowledge and social relations (Jon McKenzie), then Tuis (for Telekt-Uell-In, Bertolt Brecht’s anagram for intellectuals) are performers that link art with business, morality, and freedom. This they do on tiptoes, perhaps in a similar fashion to the way in which one enters this performative exhibition.

Polyester fabrics with visually striking digital prints envelope, obscure and hide the material, which is actually at stake from the visitors. It remains undercover. Steady, gentle coming and going breathing noises make the windows vibrate. TipTui – Performance Undercover is also an effort to take freedom away from one’s own artistic approach.

The text that the visitor experiences is polyphonic – an audio loop that is layered over the breathing noises from Knobel’s earlier performances. Delving deeper, the artist engages with a dialogue pertaining to her long-term research on cotton, and its inextricable colonial entanglement with the phantasms of modernity. The narration refers to Brecht’s play, Turandot, or the Whitewasher’s Congress (1953), written in 1953. In a state which holds a monopoly on cotton, the Tuis secure their own profits, by depriving the people of the yield generated by the raw material; the cotton is kept concealed from the eyes of the people so as to hide from them the great wealth now held by the state. When the people revolt against the miserable situation, the hidden cotton warehouse is set on fire by Gogher Gogh, alias A.H., who is flirting with the Tuis. A worst-case scenario that is an emergency: the burning of the cotton, a concealment of profit and a willful attempt to extinguish the substance that had produced immense wealth and yet also enormous unpredictable inequalities.

Knobel's critique begins with Kerstin Stakemeier's assumption that we are forced to participate in the perpetuation of a system of abstract valuations in which racism is used as an inclusive vehicle for profit. Through the artist's own entanglements, the exhibition opens up an ambivalent memory space; one that connects us to the constancy of otherness while simultaneously presenting visitors with some of the performance effects that legitimize our social relations.

TipTui – Performance Undercover was created in 2019 for the Zurich offspace Raum*station.