Programme
Tinkebell
Ormston House is delighted to welcome Tinkebell to Limerick for an artist’s talk as the closing event for our current exhibition DOGS.
Tinkebell (born 1979, The Netherlands) provokes by exemplifying the blind spots of modern society. She confronts a public that revels in being indignant about everything that has nothing to do with them, but at the same time is very apologetic about their own actions. She questions why millions of male chicks are brutally killed every day, but she gets arrested for threatening to do the same in public. Why are people who openly discuss the lowering of the sexual age of consent treated as vile pedophiles, but are ‘barely 18’ websites intensely popular?
By turning her own cat into a handbag she tries to show people their own hypocrisy about the use of animals for consumption and leather production. If anything, her works form a extreme incentive for the discussion of our morals and the way society is developing.
These actions often leave her with a lot of negative feedback. From all corners of the web people have used the relative anonymity of the internet to send her the most foul death wishes. Fascinated by the enormous anger and cruelty of these messages, she tried to find the people behind them. To her surprise these were ordinary people living ordinary lives. For these people the internet was a faceless funnel for their anger, a one-click way of justifying their indignance. Tinkebell’s reaction to this flood of hatemail was publicising a book, called dearest Tinkebell, in which she identifies these anonymous criticasters. In this way she defies the awkward position of an artist on the internet. She no longer is just the receiver of all this faceless anger, but takes charge in respodning to it.