Since his very first performance in the Kitchen in New York in 1978, Mullican has worked with hypnosis. Over the years Mullican has developed a practice of being hypnotized in public, which has lead to the formation of a character with specific gestures and traits. This character is referred to as “That Person”, and in every performance displays recurring behaviour such as singing, crying, making coffee and drawing on walls.

Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, CA, 1951) lives and works in Berlin. Since the beginning of his artistic career in the early 1970s Mullican’s work deals with questions of perception of reality, fiction and the imaginary and the possibilities of its representation. It is the rich world of experiences and visual information which Mullican aims to structurize and categorize encyclopaedically in a huge arsenal of images and signs – however conscious he is about the inevitable incompleteness of his project. For this he uses as diverse media as drawings, photographs, flags, glass- and stone sculptures, light boxes, bulletins, computer generated city scapes, and video. Mullican’s work has been exhibited internationally, a.o. in Hedah (Maastricht, 2010), Haus der Kunst (Munchen, 2009), Ludwig Museum (Keulen, 2005), Anton Kern Gallery (New York, 2002), Stedelijk Museum (Schiedam, 1998) and Documenta (Kassel, 1982, 1993 en 1997). His performances took place in a.o. the Kitchen (New York, 1978 and 1979), ICA (Boston, 1983), Festival a/d Werf (Utrecht, 1998) and Tate Modern (London, 2007).

Vanessa Desclaux is an independent curator based in Paris. She is currently a practice-based researcher at Goldsmiths College in London on the MPhil/PhD programme in Art. She is currently a researcher in Theory at the Jan Van Eyck academie in Maastricht. Between July 2009 and January 2011, she was co-curating the exhibitions programme at Bloomberg SPACE, London. Between 2006 and 2009, she was assistant curator at Tate Modern, working on the programme of performances. She curated the exhibitions Here We Dance, Tate Modern, 2008; The artist is a mysterious entertainer, de Appel, 2008; Stutter, Tate Modern, 2009; and le Chant de la carpe, centre d’art Parc Saint Léger, 2009. Selected writing includes Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Out of Place, Art Press 2, Aout-Septembre 2007; To fabulate is to fabricate giants, in Geoffrey Farmer, Source Book 5, Witte de With, 2008; Historical facts are as mythic as literary constructs. Essay on the work of Olivia Plender, A Prior magazine issue 19, 2010; Script for a Stuttering exhibition, in Život umjetnosti, Summer 2010; Step Into Tangram Rule, Volume issue 2, January 2011.