"Dear Guests"
[2025]
Featured in a Now Media article by Matt Medved
Showcased in Art on Tezos Berlin's Week of Code & Creativity
Commissioned by anonymous performance artist, OONA.
Reflective Spandex Knit with 4-Way Stretch - Rainbow Fabric
“Dear Guests” by OONA is a video artwork that began as a live performance at Art on Tezos in Berlin, curated by The Second-Guess. The work looks at how acts of seeing and recording can reshape what is being seen, tracing the fragile line between performance, documentation, and participation.
During the performance, OONA wore a dress engineered to activate only under camera flash. The garment appeared neutral in person but changed appearance depending on the device aimed at it. Each viewer’s camera produced a different version of the same moment, turning the audience into participants through the act of photographing.
For the video, the performance was reconstructed from audience footage. Because flash is a still-image phenomenon, it cannot exist in moving image, which makes the video a reinterpretation rather than a record. The work reveals how something as simple as light can define the boundary between seeing and remembering.
The work also draws on conversations around visibility and perception. Its logic recalls Carlos Di Silva’s exploration of perception-dependent materials, where spectators become active variables rather than passive observers. It resonates with Karolina Krupickova’s understanding of exposure as a process that reveals by simultaneously withholding, making visibility contingent and unstable. In spirit, it aligns with Hito Steyerl’s reflections in “How Not to Be Seen”, questioning how bodies and images navigate systems of capture and control.
“Dear Guests” reflects on the ways images are shaped by their observers. The most complete versions of the work exist not in the film itself but in the private phones of those who captured it. OONA’s work turns documentation into a shared gesture, distributed across everyone who was present.
