Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show”
An old television set, its picture tube smashed, the light inside flickering like a dying star.
Out of the set tumble small, colorful Punch-and-Judy puppets—smiling, grotesque, mindless.
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show” shows what happens when entertainment turns into schooling.
Television—once a window to the world—became a mirror of our naiveté.
We think we’re informed, yet we’re choreographed.
The “reality” we’re sold is filtered, cut, staged.
The installation is a cry against the constant manipulation of our gaze.
It reminds us that the brain doesn’t distinguish between lived and viewed—
and that every screen is a silent teacher.
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show” calls for liberation:
Smash the stage
before it decorates your heads.
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show”
Applause, ladies and gentlemen!
The next season of global dumbing-down begins shortly.
Here, in this venerable box of wood and glass,
heroes were made for decades, enemies invented, and truths served in portions.
A little blood, a little love, a few ads—voilà, the evening program.
The picture tube is broken—at last.
The puppets spill out, stringless, scriptless.
But don’t worry: the light still twitches.
Reality dies last.
This work is a homage to the grand theater of semblance—
and an invitation to finally leave the auditorium.
Credits roll.
Punch waves.
And we’re still clapping.
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show”
A box.
A blow.
Light breaks.
Puppets fall,
smiles freeze.
The truth
still flickers—
a last spark
from the tube.
Then silence.
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show”
Television was never a window.
It was a mirror that schooled us—
our fears, our ideals, our enemies.
Meseg’s shattered set reveals the wound in the collective mind.
The puppets tumbling out are ourselves—
children of illusion, fed on fiction.
The brain does not distinguish between reality and screen.
It believes what it sees.
Thus are born prejudices, beauty ideals, worldviews—
produced in studios, sold as experience.
The flickering remnant light inside is disturbingly honest:
It shows the show goes on,
even when the curtain is long since burned.
“Stop the Punch-and-Judy Show” is not a title—
it is a prayer for the freedom to think for oneself.
