RECEIVING, REENACTING, RESCRIPTING / 2019
Erika Tan in collaboration with Whiskey Chow, Jess Heritage, Michael Taiwo - with interjections from Hammad Nassar and questions by Lois Keidan
Continuing on from her other projects which have explored the movement of ideas, people and things, Erika will be facilitating a discussion using re-enactments of the archived documents of Southeast Asian live art practices, to focus on context, authorship, spectatorship in relation to archives, documentation and performativity. Working with the format of a crit, Hammad Nassar will be invited as a guest tutor; the audience participatory discussants; and three artists whose work focuses on performance, but whose specificities place them outside of and possibly ignorant of the contexts and practices held within this current collection of material from Southeast Asia will re-enact selected works based on the documentation available to them through the archive. Further documentation will take place during the event, and this will be lodged alongside the original material in the archive.
Collaborators:
Whiskey Chow is a London based performance artist and Chinese drag king. Engaging with political issues in her practice, Whiskey Chow also explores female masculinity, stereotypes and cultural projection of Chinese and Asian identity. Interdisciplinarily making performance, moving image and experimental sound piece, Whiskey's works are context sensitive, which move between gallery space and live art scene.
Jess Heritage works primarily with performative attempts to articulate that which exists at the edge of language. Her performances embody the futile effort to define that which slips, the ‘something like this, but not this’ as a Sisyphean labour of searching, of failing to see, of searching again and again and again.’
Michael Taiwo is a London based multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on questioning the role of race in the perception of identity and challenging the conventions of gender roles through spoken word and movement based works.
His works combine elements of vulnerability and sentiment to create narratives that capture tender moments in their rawest form.
Hammad Nasar is an independent curator and Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where he co-leads the London, Asia project. He is also Senior Research Fellow (Black Artists and Modernism) at University of the Arts London. He co-founded the London-based arts organisation Green Cardamom (2004-12), and was Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2012-16). His curatorial projects include Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2005-2013) and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).
Lois Keidan is a co-founder and co-Director of the Live Art Development Agency. She was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London from 1992 to 1997, and before that was responsible for national policy and provision for Performance Art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of Great Britain, and worked at the Midland Group Nottingham and Theatre Workshop Edinburgh. She contributes articles to a range of journals and publications and gives presentations on Live Art at various conferences and festivals in the UK and internationally.
