Nominal Value
1.5 hours,
02-05 until 07-05-2025,
Empty Spaces IV Project,
Areal Böhler, Düsseldorf, Germany
“Nominal Value” is about transactional voting, fake promises, sour propaganda that was sold as sugar but turns bad once you have tasted it and it didn’t meet at all the expectations that were dangled in front of you.
Description:
This performative installation unfolds across a grid of nine deliberately crooked voting booths, accompanied
by a mobile cart stacked with boxes of sugar, a functioning cotton candy machine, a surveillance camera,
a central table, red and white sugar, a stack of voting ballots, and a ballot box. Each booth bears the word *Wahlkabine* (voting booth) printed in either red or white font—five red, four white—suggesting a coded political alignment.
Over the course of a week, the installation is activated daily by a group of eight performers: seven voters and one cotton candy machine operator. The audience witnesses a staged electoral process in which each voter must choose between two fictional “sugar parties.” One party—marked by red, blue, and white—offers a box of sugar in exchange for their vote, illustrating a transactional model of democracy. After casting their ballot, voters take the sugar to the operator, who produces a red cotton candy that tastes deliberately unpleasant. The interaction is humiliating, replicating the moment of disillusionment when a politically motivated “sweet deal” turns bitter.
By contrast, voters who choose the gray-white party participate freely and without bribery. They receive a simple white cotton candy—unconditional, palatable, and served with dignity. Through this contrast, the work probes the ethics of political participation, complicity, and the illusion of agency under systems of manufactured consent.
At the end of each cycle, the performers disassemble the installation and relocate it to another area within Hall 9 at Areal Böhler, physically and symbolically reconfiguring the space of power and surveillance. The lenticular photographic prints that mark the next site act as placeholders of political memory and false promises.
Concept:
Nominal Value presents a staged electoral process within a grid of nine voting booths, some marked with red and others unmarked. Three performers cast their votes while a fourth operates a cotton candy machine. Those voting in red-marked booths exchange ballots for colored sugar, while others cast their votes freely and receive cotton candy without prior exchange. A singular table, devoid of privacy walls, stands apart, overseeing the process under the eye of a surveillance camera. Throughout the performance, the installation itself remains in motion, shifting after each voting cycle, oscillating between predetermined locations where lenticular photographic prints serve as placeholders for its next position.
At its core, the installation of Nominal Value dismantles the structures of trust within electoral systems, exposing how participation is sometimes reduced to an illusion of choice. The work plays with the symbolic weight of transactional voting, where sugar mirrors political incentives, promised yet ultimately unsatisfying.
The interplay between action and reaction in the performance reveals a choreography of power, where agency is surrendered in the face of predetermined outcomes.
The spatial organization of the installation alludes to the game-like nature of contemporary politics, drawing on the visual language of tic-tac-toe—a game that appears strategic yet often ends in an impasse. The marked booths function as predetermined pathways, guiding choices that are, in reality, already decided. The contrast between expectation, belief and fulfillment manifests in the performers’ reactions: disgust, frustration, or passive acceptance, reflecting the spectrum of public sentiment in electoral cycles.
Surveillance, ritual, and deception converge within this framework, challenging the audience to confront their own complicity in systems of governance. The teasing before receiving the cotton candy mimics the political spectacle— performers reach, hesitate, and are met with a moment of humiliation before being handed their reward. This withholding and dispensing of sweetness echoes the mechanics of political favor, reinforcing power structures that manipulate hope and desire.
Through a distillation of electoral gestures and economic metaphors, Nominal Value operates as a critical reflection on the commodification of democracy. It asks: What is the worth of a vote when its value is pre-assigned? When does political participation become performance rather than agency?
Artist’s Note:
Nominal Value premiered on May 2, 2025, during the opening of Empty Spaces IV, coinciding with the long-postponed Romanian presidential election. The piece draws directly from political realities in Romania, where parties often buy votes in impoverished villages with staples like oil, sugar, or flour.
On May 6, the Romanian elections advanced to a second round with the far-right populist AUR party leading, while in Germany, the AfD was formally recognized as a right-wing populist party.
This alignment of global political events underscores the urgency of Nominal Value as a project. It reflects a post-autonomous, critically engaged approach to performance and installation, that resists neutrality and insists on confronting the spectacle and manipulation of democratic processes. For Cristiana Cott Negoescu, the work is not merely performative, but a socio-political intervention.
Performers: Emma Rüther, rabea_chatha, Gabriela Tudor, Tini Aliman, Bene Rox, Ana Behnke, Eunbi Oh
In parallel to the performative installation the photographic exhibition AD FRACTAL INFINITUM II was shown.
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