Thank you for your service
Performance by Kim Ye
selected excerpts from the performance as part of the exhibition Dear Mother,
organized by Kayla Tange and Caroline Yoo
August 13, 2022
LA Artcore
120 Judge John Aiso St. Los Angeles, CA 90012
Thank you for your service utilizes the form of a military funeral to bury the placenta from the artist’s pregnancy. Through speech, song, and movement, attendees are guided through the enactment of burial rites usually reserved for members of the US Armed Forces. The performance can be understood in four parts: 1) Eulogy, 2) Hymn, 3) Procession, and 4) Burial.
The script for the eulogy appropriates medical journalists’ descriptions of placental growth as "military invasion". Responding to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade (1973), this performance proposes an argument for reproductive rights by conjuring the the least legislated amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The Third Amendment prohibits the government from quartering soldiers “in any house without consent of the Owner”. Drawing analogies between trophoblasts and military operatives, between wombs and motherlands, this performance aims to collapse the gendered space between law, land, and labor.