Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) The initial endurance performance piece consisted of Sulkowicz carrying a mattress wherever she went on campus during her final year as an undergraduate at
Columbia University. The work was a protest against
campus sexual assault and the university's handling of the sexual assault case, in which it had cleared the accused of responsibility. Sulkowicz created
Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 as a
senior thesis while at
Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. This performance artwork was in protest against
campus sexual assault and the university's handling of Sulkowicz's
allegation that a fellow student at Columbia University anally raped her. In September that year, she began carrying it on campus, which she said was a physically painful experience. During a protest organized by the student group No Red Tape on October 29, 2014, hundreds of Columbia students stacked 28 mattresses on Columbia's president Lee Bollinger's doorstep. The mattresses symbolized the 28 sexual assault complaints in Columbia's Title IX case, reported
New York magazine. The Columbia student group Student Worker Solidarity, who booked the space for No Red Tape, would be charged $1500 for the removal of the mattresses on behalf of the university.
''Newspaper Bodies (Look, Mom, I'm on the Front Page!)'' Sulkowicz's final thesis show, the week before graduation in May 2015, included depictions of a naked man with an obscenity and a couple having sex, printed onto a
New York Times article about the student she accused. Sulkowicz said that the images were cartoons, and asked: "what are the functions of cartoons? Do they depict the people themselves (a feat which, if you've done enough reading on art theory, you will realize is impossible), or do they illustrate the stories that have circulated about a person?" and at the Southampton Arts Center,
Southampton, New York.
''Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol'' On June 3, 2015, Sulkowicz, working with artist
Ted Lawson, released ''Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol
("This is not a rape"), an eight-minute video of Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in a Columbia dorm room. When the video was first posted, each screen displayed the timestamp of August 27, 2012, the night of the alleged assault, but later the date was blurred. Sulkowicz wrote that the work, which examines the nature of sexual consent, was not a reenactment of the alleged rape and later stated that it was a separate piece from Mattress Performance
. For the first three weeks of the exhibition, Sulkowicz stood on a pedestal in the gallery, and had one-on-one conversations with visitors who would stand on an identical pedestal in front of her. The exhibition featured a life-sized robotic replica of the artist that was called "Emmatron". Emmatron plays prerecorded answers to several questions Sulkowicz has been repeatedly asked, which she will no longer respond to. A few examples of questions Emmatron had answers to included "Tell me about the night you were assaulted", "Is this art piece a part of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)''?" and "What do your parents think of all this?" If audience members asked these questions to Sulkowicz during their conversation, the artist would send them to Emmatron for the answers.
The Ship Is Sinking In 2017, Sulkowicz performed a
bondage performance piece titled
The Ship Is Sinking. In the piece, Sulkowicz (in high heels and bikini with the "Whitney" logo, to convey the look of a woman in a
beauty pageant) is tied up, berated, and hung from the ceiling on a wooden beam by a man in a suit, "Master Avery", as the figurehead of a ship. while "it's a privilege that I don't really have so I'm trying to work in a way that makes the best use of that position as I can." At closing time, the museum turned off its lights, but spectators stayed and used phone flashlights to continue watching until Sulkowicz was finished. Sulkowicz portrayed being able to express the pain she felt and endured, putting herself physically within the artwork. Sulkowicz was reportedly "appalled" by the comments, asking, "Are you only showing work by
Harvey Weinstein?" The protest was described as a "performance" in the media,
The Floating World From March 10 to April 22, 2018,
The Invisible Dog gallery in
Brooklyn, New York, hosted Sulkowicz's first gallery installation as a
performance artist, a piece entitled
The Floating World. The piece consists of a series of glass orbs that symbolize trauma, suspended by ropes, containing floating artifacts of personal significance to Sulkowicz and members of her community. A hybrid style of Shibari,
Japanese bondage, and Ukidama, Japanese
glass floats tied by fishnets, are used respectively to lift and hold the orbs in the air. The relationship of the ropes and the orbs is the metaphor for the love and support Sulkowicz received from loved ones and the community. ==References==