As a direct response to the racist and sexist event called Happy Ending during Gallery Weekend 2018, this collaborative performance used stereotypical racial and gender imaginings of Black men and Asian women. Played to an incredibly mixed race audience, this work was highly transnational in nature, gathering reference material in the USA and Germany, resulting in an aggregate work about cultural identity, intersectional racism, and collaborative resistance.
Background:
Happy Ending was an after hours event organized by Berlin based party planner and fashion design label Dandy Diary and sponsored by Galerie König. Taking place in a rented Asian restaurant, the invited attendees were greeted at the door and given fortune cookie by Thai masseuses dressed in sexy bathrobes. Ignoring protests from the Asian German community that the event objectified and sexualized East Asian women, the organizers balked at the request for a community discussion to unpack the ways in which such reductive racist caricatures demean and offend an entire racial group. I am not a Fortune Cookie was the response to this outrage.
In addition, the highly offensive hoodie that Dodd-Ellis donned in the N-Kissing Bondage performance referred to another questionable project of Dandy Diary. In 2018 H&M pulled the Coolest Monkey in the Jungle hoodies off their shelves, after an ad sparked racist accusations on social media. After the ad of a young black boy model wearing it (sometimes) next to a young white model wearing a Safari Expert t-shirt, H&M faced global backlash. Citing racial insensitivity and poor judgment, their apology was lukewarm, sorry to have offend people, but not for posting the ad. In the midst of the crisis, in a bizarre intervention, Dandy Diary re-printed their own Coolest Monkey in the Jungle hoodies to sell on their own label.
When asked about their reasons, their shallow answer was merely, “We found it unfortunate that after a few days it was all forgotten.” However, they never talked deeply about “it”, meaning H&M’s institutional racism and cultural insensitivity. Can they explain how the action of wearing a re-print of the H&M hoodie at a fashion show in Berghain in front of a mainstream white European crowd confronts racism in a meaningful way? In fact, by selling these hoodies for an exorbitant price of 70€, they are employing H&M’s blunder for their own economic benefit. If Dandy Diary was really sincere in the desire to combat bigotry, why did they not make a statement against racism and donate part of the earnings to Black Lives Matters or another anti-racist organization?