In The NarcoSexuals Dries Verhoeven portrays a group of men who lose themselves in sexual drug use. Visitors can walk around the replica single-family home, and peek through the windows at the depiction of a chemsex party.

In one sense, the work questions our relationship to subversion and brazen sexual gratification in an increasingly sanitised public domain. Yet the performance also shows men in their faltering search for vulnerability and companionship. Are they the vanguard of a new liberation movement? Forty years after gay liberation, are we entering a ‘narco-sexual revolution’? Or have we ditched our sexual ideals and left the revolution lying comatose on the couch?

The NarcoSexuals is a durational performance that takes place in a loop of 50 minutes. Audience members buy a ticket for a time slot, but can stay as long as they want. With the same ticket they can also leave and come back later during the night.  

Dries Verhoeven (1976, Oosterhout, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist working at the intersection of visual and performing arts. He creates installations, performances, and public interventions that critically explore themes of spectatorship, fissures in contemporary society, collective vulnerability, and the mythopoetic dimensions of crisis. By destabilizing the boundaries between observer and participant, Verhoeven creates spaces where viewers confront their complicity in systems of power, their ambivalence toward mediated realities, and the fragile threads connecting individual agency to collective responsibility. More