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Kenneth Tam

In 2011, I went to a group exhibition somewhere in Los Angeles, at a space whose name I can’t recall and which no longer exists. The only work I remember seeing that night was Kenneth Tam’s video 

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force

, and I’ve never forgotten it. In my memory, it played in its own room, upstairs in a house, and I sat on a bench and watched the whole thing several times. In the video, Kenneth Tam, an Asian American man wearing a red flannel shirt, jeans, and sneakers, walks around a large cardboard box on the carpeted floor of a room. There is a man in the box who speaks in a flinty voice. They met on Craigslist. The Man in the Box negotiates with Tam: 

Take your clothes off, come closer, let me touch your butt, I want to grasp your genitalia

. We see only his arms, which he puts through holes he cuts in the box. Tam circles, hesitates, gets close to the outstretched hand, then backs up. He becomes naked below the waist, then puts his underwear back on. The Man in the Box makes a forced laugh whenever Tam says no to a request, which Tam does often. You can feel the Man in the Box’s pervy frustration through the cardboard.

You worry a little bit for Tam as the Man in the Box pokes his finger in between Tam’s butt-cheeks, reaches out to hold his junk. It’s at once threatening and cringe, menacing and pathetic. The intimacy, the reach for intimacy, only unshadows the bare alienation and unwieldy distance between the two men. You tell yourself that Tam is in control – it’s his camera, his situation, his art – and you wonder at the kink of it, at who is getting off more. How do these kinks feed on each other? About the work, Tam writes on his website: ‘After repeated discussions [on Craigslist], we ultimately agreed upon a set of conditions that attempted to satisfy both of our respective needs. His frustrated intentions quickly came into tension with my own refusal to fully acquiesce to his demands, yet at the same time my prerogatives as an artist required me to compromise my position and meet him halfway.’

The acutely uncomfortable vibe that pervades this video, as it does all of Tam’s work, has to do with this sticky point of collapse between refusal and acquiescence, of desires as demands, of satisfaction measured through tension, of the mild but oppressive suffering that lives in between awkward pauses, what lurks in what is not said.

In a word, it’s the ick that is the negotiation of masculine sociality. No other artist does this ick better. As his work has progressed since that early video of 2011 – moving from staged, performative videos like tone-poems suffused with sumptuous awkwardness, to more cinematic pieces that use edits and exquisitely coloured mise-en-scène to propel a muscular logic of storytelling – Tam has become his generation’s most fearless documentarian of the fact that masculinity structures our very world through this ick. It is the ick of how the softest, most hesitant parts of individuality are squashed and shaped through forceful, even brutal, concessions of socialization; and that this is not a side effect but the most necessary function of how masculine sociality is constituted at all. The ick comes from how one’s willingness to participate in this concession is the badge of honour with which masculinity rewards all of us forced to live under its regime. It’s the system that funnels everyone into hierarchical types, and then commends those whom it deems to fall into the type at the top (the leader, the alpha). In Tam’s work, we watch this negotiation of hierarchy, of dominance and submission, of leader and follower – whose hesitation or vulnerability can be steamrolled by someone more certain, more ruthless – and this plays out in situations Tam has pointedly constructed to always put the body on the line. The vulnerability of his male performers is enacted through various stages of nudity, or close proximity, or prompts to be tender and open towards each other. It is so visceral, it thumps in your throat while you watch. You feel as if insecurity is how men know they have bodies at all: there’s the embarrassment of having to live inside the body, the uneasiness of where to put one’s hands, how to hang one’s arms, how to stand in such a way as to appear – but never actually to 

Tam has always asked the question: How do men become men? Each Tam video work focuses on rituals that produce specific masculinities: father–son bonding (s

, 2020, originally a performance), male social clubs of the kind that gather in suburban basements (

, 2016). Throughout these works, he lets the question move from how much of this loss of autonomy is one’s choice, to how much it is the result of an individual bending and breaking under external pressures. From there, the question becomes how and why these external pressures came to be. Does anyone enjoy them? Who needs them? What do they cost us? How, and why, is this price not the same for each of us? How is it determined by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality? The fact of this price means that there is always the threat of violence, and Tam’s work is atmosphered with it, producing the fog of the question: Why does masculinity invest in rituals of violence as a way to get to intimacy?

Tam’s work does not offer declarative answers to any of these questions. Instead, he creates situations, images, and symbols that show how masculinity builds itself atop a foundation of boundaries being breached, or in danger of being breached. I think of how the idea of the boundary itself – a wall, a barrier, a membrane – feels especially constitutive of the masculine, insofar as the boundary functions as a thing to be destroyed, the thing towards which a penetrative force is aimed and propelled. Forgive my cis-heterosexual gender essentialism but, when I watch Tam’s work, I cannot stop thinking of how, when individual identity is constantly repressed for the benefit of the group – so that the group 

 the group – it produces a world where any moment of gentleness, trust, and connection is predicated on the awkward. Such moments function as wayward instances of consensual penetration; tender, shy emotion allowed to spurt through. Tam is a master at revealing the expression of this awkwardness, how risky anything sensitive, anything careful, is in this world. When the men in his videos are asked to compliment each other, you feel as though you’re watching someone carve out his own heart with a blunt blade and then ask if anyone might want to hold it.

When I watch Tam’s work, I think, ‘Is this gay?’ And then I realize that this is the exact question masculinity asks itself all the time. The threat of queerness is everywhere in a Tam piece, like an id, an elephant in the room, a Higgs boson particle that holds everything together but is unseen and can’t be measured with normative instruments. All of his male performers – who are unrehearsed, unscripted, and who, Tam makes a point to note, participate in the work not only for the money but because of their own interests and curiosities – seem very straight and very cis, but not necessarily by choice or desire. This sits on their frames just as awkwardly as tenderness does. It recalls the strings attached to puppets: the puppet master’s hands loom above, enacting the choreography of the patriarchy, and it’s the gracelessness as such of the puppets’ movements that gives them grace. The straight-cisness of these men is simply another aspect of their masculinity that seems to have been forged in the furnace of patriarchy’s hegemonic machinations – they’ve been burned by it, branded. When one man in 

, the video work about the high school prom, admits to wishing his prom date had been the girl’s best friend, who was a boy, it comes as a shock. There you are! I said to the screen.

, a two-channel video work from 2022, is Tam’s most cinematically accomplished video and also the most overtly queer in its symbolism. It proposes the figure of the Asian cowboy, what he might look and be like, what he might mean. Possibly the most redolent archetype of straight-cis masculinity, the cowboy can never not be camp – there is his colossal chin carved as if from stone, the legs splayed around a heaving animal, that walk that is all pelvis! – and Tam’s Asian cowboys are outlandishly camp. The dudes in the video are dressed like the Marlboro Man, though the costume seems ill-fitting against their non-white skins. They ride a mechanical bull in front of a fuchsia sound-stage sunset, and it made me think of how utterly unnecessary but very, very fun bull-riding must be. Their wavering voices speak towards prompts Tam has given them to describe sensuality, and again, we watch moments of tenderness ejaculate onto the scene in smears of gawky unease. These are interspliced with a long tracking shot through a mining tunnel, and then there are cuts to an Asian male dancer, deftly moving his body in the street.

, and pushes it into new territory for Tam in its engagement with a historical event, is a voiceover of a fictional text Tam wrote trying to imagine the first-person perspective of a Chinese labourer during the Transcontinental Railroad strike of 1867.

This text is fiction because, as Tam has noted in talks about the work, there are no first-person accounts from the Chinese workers themselves. There are only accounts from the rail company or white laborers, and Tam wanted to feel into this invisible history, let it hover in the air of those fuchsia sunsets that glow behind some of our most primary myths. By setting up this juxtaposition of the mythic Asian cowboy next to the ‘manifest destiny’ of the American dream that is always powered by racialized slave labour, 

 brings us again to a close, squirming encounter with that primary mechanism of how any individual’s assimilation into a group is always an index of how much of themselves they must lose – but here it reveals the site of this encounter as a place of fiction, a storytelling device, a mythos of the fantastical speculation that is the spine of society’s most intractable beliefs.

What I mean is: Men aren’t platonically real, born that way, determinedly pure quintessences, no matter how much they insist they are. They are formed – we form them – as much as any identity. For all its taciturn silence, refusal to emote, and smothering of expression, masculinity is one of the loudest storytellers that’s ever been, and its favourite subject is itself. In fact, what masculinity as storyteller does best is to make every character, every subject, every scene, every trope become a reflection, either affirmative or negative, of its own function, secondary to the telling of its own tale. This is why identity is always defined by its relationship and proximity to the myth masculinity tells about itself: You’re either one of us, or you are Other.

What Tam’s work has made me understand, though, is that masculinity gets off the most on declaring that no one has guaranteed entry into its club. It is the kink of masculinity that a huge entry fee must be exacted from 

 trying to get in, and masculinity as such is the enforcement of this entry fee at every door – even, or especially, at sites that were never doors to begin with. Masculinity is the telling of its own story in such a way that every site of encounter, of possible connection, has been transformed into a threshold to be crossed, a boundary to be breached, an innocent to be conquered, a door with a lock and a price. The preferred method of payment is the currency of ick. How much of yourself are you willing to sell to get in? How much of your soft neck are you willing to let be crushed by the heavy boot of the group? Through Tam’s work, I understand that we are never only the soft neck being crushed, nor are we only the line of boots bearing down upon it – we are all of us the fact of masculinity making us become the meeting place of these two. What happens there, what is produced under that terrible pressure, what we tell ourselves it means: this is society as men have written it. Ick!

Notes

Biographies

Ick! How Men Become Men: On Kenneth Tam

Silent Spikes

screening

Kang Seung Lee

Multidisciplinary artist Kang Seung Lee has long been concerned with the creation of various rituals of celebration and mourning, largely of queer past lives. Though the material form that these rituals have taken has shifted over time – from painstakingly rendered drawings to delicateembroideries, and, most recently, performance, sound and moving image – a core intention has always remained throughout Lee’s works: to enact a practice of caretaking and recovery.

Delving into the lives of artists and cultural makers who have all sadly – and prematurely – passed away, Lee pushes against the limits of the archive by forming, in his own words, ‘relationships with the living and with the dead’

 These relational, affective and spiritual encounters imbue his artworks with an air of reverence and a feeling of loss, while also inviting us into a space of yearning and possibility.

(2023), a small group of contemporary collaborators embody the legacy of a dancer and choreographer from another place and time, and all of them cross paths with other artists at Lee’s invitation. Like in many of his other works, Lee here performs a sort of resuscitation, not of a personhood but of the essence of their life’s work, simultaneously merging different historical, geographical and cultural scenes through a process of fabulation and visual storytelling.

Eliel Jones:
Though I have always recognized a sort of performativity present throughout your practice, I was really excited to see dance appear in 

. You sought to bring back to life the practice of Goh Choo San (1948–1987), a pioneering Singaporean-born choreographer who, despite having choreographed and performed for prominent ballet companies throughout the world, is little known in dance and cultural history. How did you come across him?

Kang Seung Lee:
The way I learned about his life actually speaks to the core of my work. I first encountered Goh Choo San’s work through someone else’s, which was a documentary about Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Baryshnikov was principal dancer and artistic director of American Ballet Theatre in New York City. And because he was one of the most important figures in dance at that time, a British TV channel made a documentary about him. On the other hand, in the early 1980s, Goh was an emerging choreographer, though he was quickly considered to be doing things very differently, particularly because of his focus on hand gestures; he worked with his dancers to use their hands to express emotions. Baryshnikov and American Ballet Theatre commissioned a work by Goh in 1981, titled 

. At that time, Baryshnikov and the dancers of ABT were doing a lot of rehearsals with Goh, and so he appears briefly in the documentary. I first watched the documentary maybe fifteen years ago, and saw this incredibly flamboyant Asian person – in fact, the only Asian person in the whole documentary – talking about the piece and how he’s trying to use the male body as a focus of the work, which was also quite different from classical ballets at the time.

After watching the film, I tried to do some further research but I couldn’t find much more than a Wikipedia page. It wasn’t until 2019, when I connected with Singaporean curator and writer Binghao Wong, that I was able to get a better sense of the dance and cultural sphere in Singapore and make additional findings. During the pandemic, I was able to get in touch with Goh’s family and his best friend, Janek Schergen, who’s now creative director of the Singapore Ballet. Goh’s family is large: he had nine siblings, including his sister Goh Soo Khim, who is only a couple of years older and who’ss also a ballet dancer and co-founder of Singapore Dance Theatre (now Singapore Ballet). She’s been actively pushing to keep his legacy alive, partly through the creation of the Singapore Ballet but also by dancing Goh’s works posthumously with other dancers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Soon after, I visited Singapore to do further research at the Singapore National Archive, and I also received materials from the family and Janek. What I learned in the process is that Goh Choo San was very successful in the USA, particularly in the early and mid-1980s, so this made me really wonder why his legacy was non-existent, particularly in the queer context here in the USA today. He’s more celebrated back in Singapore, because of his family but also because of this nationalistic tendency to celebrate someone who has been successful in the West. I asked quite a few people why he might not be remembered better elsewhere, and one reason is obviously that he was this person in diaspora, so his work never really existed in one single country or place. But also, a lot of dancers, historians and critics of dance at that time were wiped out during the AIDS epidemic, so there weren’t a lot of people who were able to record and write about his work. This has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the historical citation of not only Goh’s work but also many of his peers in that generation.

EJ:
I’m interested in how you’ve approached this loss of citation as an opportunity to imagine how to cite 

you invited Brussels-based Filipina dancer and choreographer Joshua Serafin to respond to and embody Goh’s 

from 1981. You also collaborated with KIRARA, a composer and musician based in Seoul who produced the accompanying soundtrack for the piece. I find it very beautiful that the gesture of your invitation to these and other collaborators for the film is from a lens of responding to Goh’s life and practice, rather than from a desire to create a ‘straight’ re-enactment of 

as an existent piece. Your approach demands a different kind of involvement with hiswork; it calls for embodiment as a form of study. How did you approach working with your collaborators as an invitation to create their own relationships to Goh Choo San?


KSL:
From the beginning I wasn’t really interested in reperforming Goh’s works. For one thing, that’s already been done by other ballet companies. Also, I was very interested in the idea of queerness as something that is constantly in transformation, thinking here of José Esteban Muñoz and his theorizing of queer futurity as something that will always be changing. I really wanted to speak about Goh’s work in this way, in relation to queerness and how it’s constantly evolving. I felt that had to come from multiple perspectives other than my own, and by bringing in someone like Joshua, for instance – who is trained as a ballet dancer but is also a nonbinary person who is making work from that position and identity – it happened very organically. We did study Goh’s work and his process very intensely at some point. But always the invitation was towards asking ourselves, with the legacy of someone like Goh, what kind of future(s) do we want to imagine through the gestures of our bodies? I wanted to think through this question in the film as something of an embodied experience, while at the same time expressing a homage to Goh’s work as something that’s about the present and the future. In this way it became a sort of collective reimagining.

EJ:
This approach towards producing a collective reimagining of something or someone through interweaving different practices appears in your work in other ways. For 

,there are other artists with whom you collaborate outside the form of an invitation like the one you extended to Joshua and KIRARA. For instance, the title of the work itself is borrowed from a poem by Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia (1903–1950), and verses from that same poem appear at the beginning of the film transcribed into artist Martin Wong’s (1946–1999) American Sign Language ‘font’, which you very carefully adapted from Wong’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. Again, to me these presences feel less like re-enactments of works and more like invocations; material and affective explorations that call the artists in question into the room, or in this case onto the screen or the stage. In the past, you’ve similarly introduced the work of other artists who never met each other in real life, and you make them correspond through your artworks in the most beautiful and poetic ways – such as in your other moving image piece in the Akeroyd Collection, 

(2018), where you bring together the work of Korean writer Joon-soo Oh (1964–1998) with that of British filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–1994). Could you talk a little bit about how you approach this process of introducing other artists’ work into your practice, and to each other?

KSL:
My collaborations have always been both with the dead and the living, because I revisit the works of artists who are no longer with us, but indeed, as you say, thinking of them as collaborators in my work. That perhaps does go back to Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and the invitation to visit that came from Keith Collins, who was Jarman’s partner (he himself died in 2018). What I was fascinated by at that time was how the garden, which is really beautiful, comes back every year despite almost all the plants having been first planted in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The roots are there, and the plants grow back every year or every other year, and they flower. They’re not exactly the same plant, but they come from these same roots and seeds, and they’re evolving all the time. So, I was thinking about how memories and histories are sort of in transformation and being written and rewritten; how they’re moving all the time.

Similarly, I’ve always understood that our thinking or art making is influenced by people who came before us. Even when we try and make something that people call ‘original’, it actually comes from all the education we received, the books we’ve read, the knowledge that was created before us. So, it’s never just our ‘own’ in that way, it really is heavily influenced. I think I wanted to speak to that in my work, particularly in relation to queer histories. Also, histories that are not from one place: a lot of the time they’re transnational, so I’m always trying to talk about more than one person from different continents, cities, locations and how their legacies are connected through history and through people in the next generations, including myself. I think the idea of creating genealogy has always been really important, whether they’re of my generation or the ones before me; this concern has continued over different projects and collaborations.

EJ:
How do these fabulated encounters take shape?

KSL:
In a way, they often happen through a series of accidents. I’m interested in many people, and I’m doing research constantly. But they happen mostly through relationships that develop in the process. In many cases I reach out to estates, or family members or friends of the departed, and I try to establish a relationship with them and let them know what I’m trying to do. In some cases, there is trust instantly, in others it takes time to create that. It’s similar with my collaborations. Sometimes I have very strong connections; other times it takes longer.

EJ:
I think it’s possible to draw out some specific threads here. What all these artists have in common is that their work has faced or risked possible erasure due to their various marginalized positions, with the common experience among them all being that they’re all queer; many also contracted HIV and died of AIDS-related complications. In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman reflects on her work of narrating counter-histories of slavery as having always been ‘inseparable from writing a history of present’.

This came to my mind in relation to your own work, which is not only concerned with acts of revisiting or restaging but with a desire to reflect on what’s stake in invoking these lives now. What does it mean to you to write these histories into the present?

KSL:
On the one hand, there are some functions to my work that are very practical. I always think about my own research process as a personal learning process. I do research, and I meet with these people, and I learn about people who are not with us. I’m literally learning the histories, bringing the memories out, and in some ways writing about them in the form of visual art. Because almost all my works have references to someone else’s work, whether images, writings or other forms of production, it can also introduce their work to new viewers: some people definitely learn about these other artists’ work through my work, and that’s actually a very important function that I’m aware of. There are so many artists who we think are well known but are in fact new to a lot of people. Goh Choo San is one example. For some people it’s their first encounter with his work, which I take very seriously.

I also want my work to go beyond the introduction. I want to talk about how we can turn to these artists’ practices as an invitation to imagine something – and in many ways somewhere – else. I’m interested in talking about these artists’ work as part of a conversation about the present, about the politics of our time. In this way, by rewriting and rethinking these pasts and our histories, there’s also a possibility and potentiality to create a different future. My work exists within that conceptual framework, particularly one that insists on not forgetting. Because my works take visual form, rather than being purely historical or social, I’m also asking for a different type of encounter. It’s an invitation through the visual, the poetic and, in this film, through movements made by different bodies to interrogate how and what we feel, which to me is as important as the histories that I’m bringing in. How do we live with this feeling? Sometimes this feeling can be about mourning and loss; at others it can be the feeling of different possibilities for the future. I believe both of these have the potential to change something about the future, or at least bring forth an urge to do that.

EJ:
Indeed, aside from the importance of introducing these artists to a new audience, you also ask us to think about what their loss means to us and others. How do we mourn those whom we do not know and whose experience is entirely different from ours? How do we react and respond to realities that are not immediately happening to us or the people we know, or the geographies that we’re familiar with? Who gets to be commemorated, memorialized and remembered within an affective space, and who doesn’t? I find these questions to be deeply political and urgently rooted in your work as well as our present moment. Palestine is a painful example of this right now – certainly of the starkly different standards that are applied to commiserating the loss of human life.

KSL:
Something like the AIDS epidemic really defined a generation at a particular time. I strongly believe what’s happening in Palestine is going to define us, and the ways that we are complicit now are going to be like generational trauma. I think about the unknown, the erased through my practice all the time. Even when I’m bringing in images of people who are more familiar to us, I introduce them also as an invitation to look at the others who have been less seen; the erased, the unknown, the bodies that we do not recognize or know. It’s about creating an entry point to really think about who is not actually remembered, and to ask now: who will not be remembered? But also, it’s about suggesting new possibilities and ways to remember as well. My work is an invitation to start a conversation and create that possibility. I think this is ultimately the most important process in my work for me: how we can collectively think about the unknown.

Notes 

The Heart of A Hand

Maeve Brennan

Lydia Ourahmane

I


Revolt against the sun, 
our desert of the sky.


If land is an image, landscape is a film,
a sea shell collection of single images, letters


From, light. To, night.


Twenty-four frames per second of a thousand and
one nights, one night, light spliced a dark cave, cinema.


Celluloid of silver halide crystals
and the glittering of sun on the sea.


Desert eyes longing for wet images
of the sea, see on screen:


a scale that only landscapes can conjure, films
lengthen time, which we call slow cinema, slow sentences,
commas, until we can’t spot the difference in the same scene:
landscape edited slowly over centuries, at the speed of detail.


Stretching time across landscape like a canvas.


Stillness is deceptive, moving images into a political
movement, from Tassili n’Ajjer to the Beqaa Valley
to a film, mapped for those who measure scale, who
move against the measures we are forced to live by.


That air blows,
That air blows,


Leave with a grain of sand, or
remain an inner-city citation.




II


Two films are rugged landscapes tracing methods
of colonial-era archaeology, of oral histories,


Two landscapes are chasing traces of local phantoms 
of knowledge, mapping the spirits of art histories.




where is the physical boundary, of the edge
of possibility, of a metaphysical geography?


The spiritual dimension of film

l-encompassing landscapes.
They are all so myst

, our experiments


are visible our myths are visible, our experiments


slipping from rock to land to landscape, filming 
an image factory of the unknowable.


Night vision in 16mm, a strict choreography 
of resource management, of camera movements.


Seeing is an act of physical endurance, look:


at the glint of paint in caves 
that art history never wanted us to see.




III




 of the Beqaa Valley
between arid and arable, human and BMW car,
drifting around and around and around and around
dusty contradictions that we hold close to our chest.


The custodians of ruins, the gleaners of history
who care, so we do not. The filmic landscape of
desert guardians from Niha in 

 who remember so we


do not have to do anything, only forget,
just drift, what car enthusiasts call drifting,
car tracks are a souvenir of the city.


Repair and restoration is a labour of land,
we grip onto land using the soles of our feet and
the wheels of our car, afraid that it will disappear
or shift in to another gear, another political car crash.


Wait in the differences between human and land
Write in the landscapes about an embodied pain
Whisper in the film about the plain disembodied
Parts of car and of limb and of sand.

The Drift

Tassili

Landscape Studies

James Richards

Trance or transmission, so James Richards’s irradiating film operates, at once some signal and some spell. A lyric, forensic account of a homebound body and its transient unconscious – optical, of course, per Walter Benjamin, but not only – 

Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold

 (2022) offers recent epidemic-era reportage streaked with the glitchy panic of the paranoiac, the ardent refrains of the romantic. (That is, those figures who insist on patterns where, perhaps, there are none.) If the delivered intelligence is both abject and pleasurable – in its deep carnal levity, in its spectral belief in bodily knowledges and the enigmatic messages of their attendant objects and images – what is such a signal or spell meant to summon, communicate, incur? Why this strange employ of surveillance genres and rituals, more self-survey here, but still? What quality of life is this?

Endoscopies and MRIs, pills and masks, pale and reddened hands and feet, stained toilet bowls and cracked sinks, diagnostic tests and sex toys, dirty slides and tubes, aesthetic inheritance and viral speculations, fears and patterns, stories of gendered ant colonies and bees, all poor images and aching songs: the manipulated images fall down the screen like some glitching waterfall. The forms and colours are pulled like candy, mirrored like nature. The images secrete colour or form, suggesting flows: of blood, semen, piss, images, sounds, light, thought, feeling. Objects and images that are scanned, panned, glitched, montaged. Loops of breath and lyric and some humid sound, the dry clicking of delay, pricking then settling then opening the nerves.

Rhythm makes the man, I kept thinking, lulled into seeing patterns where there were none, hearing loops, lyrics, auditory illusions where there were. ‘The cinematic apparatus produces a special kind of trance,’ Ute Holl writes. 

Cinema is aligned with the nervous functions as a series of impulses. If

we view cinema as a psycho-physical machine, this not only shows

images to be rhythmic impulses, it also shows that certain brain 

functions can be triggered by means of cinematic tricks.

Under what sign has Richards made this eros-laden film? What tricks, what triggers? I think about apocalypse. I think about apocalypse in its original sense, as the excavation and revealing of secret knowledges via language itself. ‘On my mind, apocalypse’, Bill Callahan sings, ludically, laconically, feverishly, across one of Richards’s spectral sequences. (He’s riding for a feeling, Bill is.) In this passage of 

, a black sky fills the screen – dark ground of the scanner evoking zero gravity – studded with buoyant, floating objects of indifferent beauty and current ruin: Q-tips, electronic thermometers, iPhone photos of white young men and their animal slaughter, cables, condoms, scissors, Euros, a green foil mask, black leather-daddy belts, postcards, shots, keys, more blue pills, a photo of a man dressed as Dracula in the wine aisle of a bodega, a broken red splat at his feet. Iconic images and objects of ritual all.

Elsewhere in the film, as Richards literally and figuratively tunnels into and among bodies, objects, rooms, materials, images, songs, sets, constructed worlds at once pharmacological and domestic, sacred and aesthetic, apparatuses both technological and tedious, his research takes him to the closest field. Is this, then, I wonder, an autoethnography of the dissembling corpus and its psychic and built environs, employing a new formulation of the ciné-trance – some filmed possession phenomenon à la Maya Deren and Jean Rouch? Or is it an auto-sacrifice for present pandemics and autofictive anti-aesthetics? To what gods is the artist trying to appeal? What is he trying to coax, to summon into existence?

‘Cinema belongs to the trance techniques of our culture because it systematically treats and shifts the normative and imaginary time frames, in which we remain subject to conscious daily production, in all the disciplines of our bodily knowledge,’Holl notes. Discipline, nervous functions, and the hyper vigilance they betray and manifest, seem to strobe and structure 

. Shot through with feeling (flooded with it, as we say), the film works by additive processes that run on parallel tracks of eros and anxiety, topical in its subject and applications. So much skin, so many surfaces (to inspect, to pan, to glitch, to suture together). If the artist appears to be in his atelier, not quite sheltering, he also seems to be in his feelings, making use. I am reminded of the advice William Godwin apparently once offered Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness “out of a set of materials within her reach.”

 (Advice that makes me laugh, wince, work. Maybe Richards too.) Holl writes:

What we call our own feelings can be objectified and adapted to the

technological state of time in cinema. Camera and editing techniques

accelerate our bodies’ own frequencies of shivering, vibrating, and

flickering. … The technology of montage lies at the border between

conscious and unconscious transmission in cinema.

The possibility of transmission – of signals of sound and image, of illness and language, of love and violence – incurs an alertness in its possible transmitter and receiver. Such vigilance might make one tunnel deep. Indeed, like so many of our possessed, with their cults and rites, their exalted objects and icons and imaginaries, Richards uses the material world, with all its highly visual orders, at once rough-hewn and brilliant, to invoke the immaterial world of our spectral doubles. That is, our psychic orders, our invisible feelings. An unconscious world of connections at once spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, brought into view (well) by some apparatus (entangled, as always, with us).

So his film goes. Scanning, panning, tunnelling, breathing, singing, washing, pissing, worrying, convalescing, dissembling, blurring, streaking, glitching, mirroring, seizing, smearing, fucking, talking, writing, making. The illusion and disillusion of movement, of transitioning from one state (of material or being) to another, a transience that can feel static, pure stasis, propels Richards’s film, collating its myriad ideas and images, not quite cleanly. The digital threads and edges come loose, stutter across the screen. The movement, shuddering then soothing then back again, feels embodied, projecting its hallucinatory, elliptical feelings back onto the viewer, making her – that is, me – shiver and calm. An ecstatic self-soothing, almost narcotic. Tricks and triggers of all kinds, indeed.


*

Entranced, lulled, and under the sign of transmission, of technological tunnelling into some forensic poetics, I decide to compile my own report on this film. Prose does not match the poetics ‘at work’ here; I need a more fragmentary form, nonlinear. I need to see the words like shards (floating across the pale field of the page). So I make a list of what I see:

All irradiating images, pill-strewn, glitching and seizing and mirroring.

Skin and porcelain, equally pale and broken, stained and smearing across

the screen, a kind of digital bleeding out. That is, filthy sinks and toilets,

in the centre of the frame, like crass pools for a debased Narcissus.

A red toilet, smeary as a lipstick’d mouth, or an ’80s-era Richter

squeegee painting, then some montage of b/w pills being manufactured

Pills, dirty slides. Pale, clammy hands and legs, red with cold or rash,

pocked with sores, skin rough and looping across the screen.

A young boy telling the story, in a sweet, high voice, of male and female

colonies and tribes of ants over a thousand years. The occasional auto-

generated captions mistaking colony for colon, taking me back to the

Q-tips, electronic thermometers, iPhone photos of white young men,

cables, condoms, Euros, postcards, shots, keys, sex toys, recording

equipment, pills.

I’ve already listed some of this, I realize, so I make a list instead of what I hear:

‘On my mind, apocalypse’, Bill Callahan sings.

‘I just want to be / I just want to be / with you / I just want to be / free’,

‘I am leaking blood / from every pore’, layered female vocals (I cannot

identify them) exclaim over a Labradford track. ‘You worship the blood …

to link, to drink … Speak until your voice is nothing / Speak until your

Delay, feedback, looped sounds and tracks.

I study these lines, these lyrics, these sounds, these words, their images, their object. All as abject as evidence. They are reports from the radiant cold, a kind of life, its qualities not quite ascertainable. This is, as Yasmine Seale has written elsewhere, on other things, and which I have already cited, ‘poetry as apocalypse, in its first sense: the uncovering by verbal means of secret knowledge’.

 Outside my room of report, my work of language and looking, the world is in some snow hypnosis. It’s a Basel scene, wintry. I look out the window, then back at my screen, its own glitchy white window glowing and spellbound with images.

. Telegrammatic, this hackneyed line of civilized violence offers expert paranoiac Cold War-era enlightenment: a spy returns to the fold. 

. Richards’s subtitle is more an illumined document of the early twenty-first-century optical-pharmacological unconscious, laden and looped with images and tracks, pills and studios, cities and viruses. Berlin seems to ground both idioms, though, both lines, at once post-war, pre-war, always at war.

More than this, though, Richards’s title cites the oeuvre of the late Horst Ademeit (1937–2010), an impoverished craftsman and often ill obsessive who, over many decades, recorded his daily environs in Düsseldorf, measuring them (in a radically subjective sense) for the effects of radiation, what he termed, evocatively, ‘cold rays’. Those rays were invisible, naturally; in his series 

 (Writing Pictures) he attempted to bring them into the visible world. I take pleasure in Ademeit’s series titles: their compact, compound, direct nature, their dedication to the subjective record. Mostly self-taught, he did attend some of Joseph Beuys’s open classes at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1970, but he quickly drifted away to his private life, private work. Beuys’s well-oiled mysticism, his own commercialized cult, did not offer easy entry to Ademeit’s more clandestine rituals.

Yet to imagine the forces of radiation and invisible harm as a kind of cold or weather pattern; to record one’s environment so forensically, paranoically, transformationally: it is not difficult to feel Richards’s interest in Ademeit here, their alignment of commitment and vision (and perhaps despair). Considering the facts of Ademeit’s life, the title of Richards’s work – 

 – suggests not cynicism but sympathy. Ademeit’s sustained attention, his all-engulfing life work, cryptic as it was, suggests a deep devotion and wild imagination to bring the invisible world, its darkest and coldest orders, into the realm of the knowable, the visible, the palpable, the traceable. All through bodily knowledge, a trust in one’s own radical perceptions. A kind of trance, as a kind of life. Holl writes:



Trance, as a dissolution or diversion of the consciousness under the

impact of certain technologies, is the gap in film theory. Here physiology

enters the humanities, challenging the idea of the subject to its very

limits. At this point physiological sensibility comes back into aesthetic

theory, from which philosophy had separated it and held it at bay. Trance

emerges from the connection between the intoxication of the senses and

technological noise. Cinema addresses the bodies that the spirit has 

What about trance, then? As both methodology and form. As a form of training, like the moving image trains its viewer. Trance might be understood as a form of consuming, unremitting attention that takes us out of our normative temporal modes; it is a hyper-focus that is artistic and spiritual in its method and manifestation, conscious and unconscious both, and often driven by technology. How do we get there, though? What marks its state of being or nonbeing or collective being? Propulsive movement and sound often frame a trance, illusionary or not. Such movement opens out the body into a feeling of connection and collectivity – of losing one’s sense of self and autonomy in something larger. If this is sometimes called divine love, religious devotion, musical devotion, meditation or poetics, it is practised by cults of all kinds.

I wonder, then, what Richards’s filmic movement here – which seemingly empties out the body by tunnelling into it – aims to summon, what atmosphere or hallucination of euphoric connection. I think about the relationship of trance to transience – that is, to being in movement, in between, unrooted, in constant transformation of self and site. Yet is it a waking dream Richards is conjuring or channelling, or a walking nightmare? Is it ecstasy as methodology, self as visionary, or images and sounds as narcotic to conjure the collective unconscious in the singular body, to break the limits of that body, that is, its consciousness, so that it might be flooded with others? Yet where does transmission enter: as fear of contamination or as method for confluence, or both?

That said, I see – that is, I feel – a deep connection between the ethnographic fields, cultural rituals and technological conditions that formed and informed the trance films of Rouch and Deren, among others, and the more autoethnographic impulses, cultural rituals and technological conditions that ground Richards’s 

. Indeed, his work might be only the latest iteration in a long lineage of trance films and ciné-trance. The possession phenomena, mostly via dance and song – from the Niger Delta across the Black Atlantic to Haitian Vodou – that inspired Rouch’s and Deren’s cameras and thinking seem to find expression in Richards’s materiality and tactics itself. If his moving images appear possessed, channelling a sensual spirit world via bodily knowledges and earthly attachments, poor images and poor bodies, the desire for revelation and ecstatic transformation does not appear ever far. And yet. Per Holl: 

Precisely because once new media like photography, film, or the

gramophone had differentiated bodies into every [

identity forms, the old philosophical order of the mind, which could not

be imagined as anything other than male and somehow pasty, did not

simply dissolve into pleasurable intoxication. The new media brought

with it new orders of bodies, wishes, and desires.

Deren once noted that she wanted to ‘put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately’.

 Bill Callahan once titled his song about apocalypse ‘Riding for a Feeling’.

‘As soon as voice, faces, movements, the gentlest trembling and the faintest coughing could be stored in media archives and thus examined and classified as bodily signs, that was the end of simply subverting the order through sensuality,’ Holl writes.

The most sensual disturbances were themselves indicators from which

the orders of illnesses, of the genders, then also of classes, cultures, or

The only way left to subvert the imaginary and the symbolic orders,

the imagination and representation, is to experiment with media

transformability itself. To transform oneself through technological tricks.

New tricks, new trades. Considering the sensual and sensorial restlessness of his film, full of pathos and bathos both, considering his larger body of work, I wonder what Richards would make of this line: 

The most sensual disturbances were themselves indicators from which the orders of illnesses, of the genders, then also of classes, cultures, or subcultures could be constituted

 is the revelation of certain life constituted by the orders of, as Holl writes, illness, gender, class, culture, subculture, and, as she doesn’t, whiteness, queerness, displacement. That said, is Richards transforming himself, his life, his myriad avatars and voices, through the tricks and trade of technology, not just filmic but other? Is this a rite for transformation, a summoning of one’s double through aesthetic means?

So many queries, I know. And yet what report does not raise questions about the intelligence offered? I consider again the cinematic tropes of surveillance: the camera zoom moving from a high window to the figure it is tracking in the street down below. I think about the tropes of ethnographic film, of Rouch’s ciné-trance: the long takes from low, following the bodies in movement, in possession, in ceremonial action, limning the drums and the dances. Yet despite Richards’s own more autoethnographic rites and hallucinations, I think, suddenly, that Richards’s film is closer to what one might call trance poiesis. Gleaned from the Greek 

,‘to make’, poiesis shares a root with poetry, but it is also used as a suffix, as in haematopoiesis, the formation of blood cells. This duality, this entanglement, is important: the relationship between making and the body, poetry and the body, film and the body, and a specifically corporeal artistic methodology that deals with states of possession and dispossession, embodiment and revelation, biology and poetics, material and immaterial orders.

In semiotic terms, poeisis reveals the emergence of something that did not previously exist; autopoiesis, for example, is the process of sustenance through the emergence of sustaining parts. Thus poeisis, in all its forms, is considered key to the production of meaning, to the sustaining of life itself. And it is this production – via the trance-like forms and various apparatuses of the moving image – that I see Richards assembling and disassembling here, a meaning at once affective, ethical, political, sensual, social, aesthetic. His camera like an I or eye, not quite coolly looking out and in. Non-narrative, ecstatically and basely subjective, his film is a form of mutation, or transmutation, from bodily alienation to pure revelation.

Apocalyptic – again, in its initial sense. This is not recall as resistance but as submission, commitment. ‘The dream requires something of me,’ Bhanu Kapil writes.

 As Holl notes (and I cite, again), ‘The only way left to subvert the imaginary and the symbolic orders, the imagination and representation, is to experiment with media transformability itself. To transform oneself through technological tricks.’ But what dream, what trance, what film, what text, what body, what trick does not repeat itself again and again? The wet, porous loop; the dry clicking of delay. The images – like bodies – arriving and blurring, glittering and continuing, suturing and disappearing. Frame frame frame.

Report from the Radiant Cold; or, A Trance Essay  (for James Richards and Ute Holl)

Aki Sasamoto

Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based Japanese artist who works in performance, sculpture, dance, installation and video. Fables, anecdotes and biographical elements often seep into works that explore relationships between body and space to engage viewers on multiple sensory levels. The balance between improvisation and structure is central to her practice, which has involved collaborations with a diverse ensemble of musicians, choreographers, mathematicians, filmmakers and engineers. Scientific terms such as centrifugal force, phase transition, yield point and strange attractor are concepts Sasamoto frequently uses to observe the disordered and ordered patterns of daily life. A similar delight in the slippages of meaning between language and everyday objects is also integral to the work, which helps to transform her cross-disciplinary experiments into a constellation of poetic and metaphorical symbols.

Originally envisaged as a lecture performed without speaking, 

(2018) is a filmic one-shot take of a long-form improvisation. Taking place in the middle of a forest, the static camera captures Sasamoto as she moves in and out of the frame. With actions that mimic the routine of window cleaning, the making of Venn diagrams, to sudden interventions with the glass itself, the absurdist performance is structured around an elaborate staging of glass panes in front of a seemingly endless and unbreakable picture frame. In this conversation, Aki Sasamoto and Billy Tang discuss the video, which like other artworks by Sasamoto feels part of a larger system, an ever-growing circuit of interconnected objects, actions and words. Sasamoto’s forthcoming solo exhibition opens at Para Site, Hong Kong, in March 2024.

Let’s begin our conversation with the title of 

 (2018). The role of translation or mistranslation is perhaps a good entry point into understanding your approach towards art making. The title suggests a process of play in the relationship between language and objects.



 
I don’t know if the title came first or whether it was after the video shoot was made. Although there’s always a chance to edit afterwards, it was essentially a one-camera situation, with one long shot that I couldn’t backtrack on. I forced myself to be inside an improvised situation, a kind of ‘no, no’ situation. For me, this is a particular state of improvising: working from the edge of knowing where the limits of possibilities are. For example, I placed the camera frame inside a series of layered glass panels, so I had to operate in a space where I knew I couldn’t go beyond the glass. The process also led to me making a Venn diagram, which is about inclusion and exclusion. It was all by chance that things began to overlap. Instead of happening from language, the title is a ‘physical’ pun created in the moments these overlaps occur. I think it was during the shoot that I had a doughnut lying around, and then it just happened to make it into the frame.

This idea of a physical pun is interesting in the context of found objects and how they’re employed into a choreography involving a chain of associations, events or actions in your work. The doughnut ended up being very prominently featured – was it really a spontaneous, last-minute decision to include it?



 
I guess it’s funny because I’ve been talking about inclusion and exclusion. I didn’t make a conscious decision to include it. I had a pane that I knew I was going to break. But there are lots of things that happened on the spot, like the use of this doughnut. I did a piece called 

in 2010, which also featured a doughnut, and because I was interested in this mathematical concept. A strange attractor is a phenomenon in a mathematically drawn graph, which is created from a series of differential equations. But I joke that this concept is about a type of attraction that never fails to attract people. So, I had a doughnut also in this piece, and I performed with it. I asked the audience ‘how to eat a doughnut inside out’. I gave the doughnut to the audience; that was part of the performance. This might be another coincidence, or maybe it’s an obsession in general, but at the time I was making that piece I was eating so many doughnuts. I was relatively new to New York, maybe within five or ten years of my living here, and I was going to different doughnut stores one by one, like I was collecting data.


BT:
There seems to be an interesting dialogue between these two works. In that specific work, you ask the audience how it feels to be inside and outside at the same time. Do you see 

as another variation of this same question?

AS:
I guess it’s the same question in many ways. 

, an online magazine. As the final output would be experienced on a computer screen, I was trying to think about the screen in terms of imagining how people might look at it as a small window from whatever surroundings they might be in. As the audience would most likely be within an interior space with a real window nearby, I was imagining what the outside of all of this would be. I was very aware of the video frame being different depending on where it would be shown, or thinking about the screen as a location where suddenly the perception of what is inside and outside flips and is played with.

BT:
It’s also another way of discovering who is on the inside and who is on the outside in terms of the audience and yourself as the performer.

AS:
That becomes tricky. I wanted to figure that out. In many places, like in New York, window cleaning is something you typically do first from the inside when you’re in an apartment building. But in Japan it’s something you do from the outside first. So, who is really on the inside? I wanted to play with this and expand on that.

BT:
There isn’t a script per se to define the entire sequence of actions that will occur. Nonetheless, we’ve been talking about certain parameters you have in place that determine the types of action that can unfold. Within the video frame, you had a set-up involving a very elaborate and seemingly infinite layering of glass. According to different moments in the performance, the screen is metaphorically and physically tended to, drawn on, or destroyed. Can you talk about the preparation involved in terms of the set-up?

AS:
I don’t really want to reveal too much detail, but of course it was planned to an extent. Everything was made, and the glass was positioned on top of a box so that once it broke, it would fall into it. There was also a microphone underneath to collect the sound of the glass as it shattered. There was a certain amount of planning behind it because we had to construct everything in advance to make this situation, and then of course we had to bring everything to the woods, where there’s no electricity and so on. I had to make a slot to hold the glass sheets with a particular distance between them to kill the reflection, for example. It’s planned, although I might break the second glass before the third one, or the second pane before the first one, and things can also change in the situation. There are a lot of variables and accidents that can occur. In the take we ended up using, for example, there was a sheet of glass that didn’t break all the way, but I ended up leaving it in. It’s not going to stop me because that’s part of the improvisation. I don’t have a script that says it has to look a certain way or that I have to do a certain action. I have space to make decisions on the spot. While the possibilities of the work are open-ended, there’s also a limit because, by making this device, I already know the boundary. After all, I’m setting it. It’s a dialogue, in fact, because the way I make it determines these boundaries. Many things have to be physically planned ahead, and this is true for a lot of my performances.



BT:
There’s a collaborative sound component to the work, which is in the style of experimental jazz and acts as a score to the performance.

AS:
Oh, yeah! Matt Bauder is a long-time collaborator and a multi-instrumentalist, somebody who is very versatile and knows every language and composition you can imagine. He’s the type of person that I’m really in tune with. I’ve known him now for more than two decades; I understand his brain, and he’s the same with my brain. We somehow merge through the improvisation.

BT:
In the process of collaborating, how did you imagine the relationship between the sound and image?

AS:
With 

, I remember I gave him the sound of the glass, and also some other sounds that I liked, but he ended up maybe not using it. For the video 

(2023), he made a whole new sound by using a very different object. There was an interest in the rhythmical intersection, and what does it mean for this kind of collision to occur between these different elements? We were thinking in terms of expressing different translations of a physical phenomenon. Usually, I get along with collaborators like him because it’s not only about the visual. Sometimes in art, it’s too much about the visual. Even with the action of drawing the circles of the Venn diagram, I don’t think it’s about the shape of the circle or why I like drawing a circle. I’m not interested in the shape itself – it’s mostly the motion of drawing and the feeling that appeals to me instead. I think I’m more interested in the time element in relation to this. The process of improvising with a musician who is very attuned to the reading of time is very interesting. It’s not only about having the need to dissect what’s visible to us; instead, we move quickly towards talking about the quality of the movement or the rhythm.

BT:
The year 2018 feels like a very different world to now. What was that particular year like for you as a backdrop of events that influenced the things that emerged in the video?

AS:
One of the things that I ended up doing, but which I didn’t include in the video, was putting myself in a kind of harness and then flying across and hanging from a tree. My friends and my partner were like, ‘Don’t do that, you’re pregnant!’ I thought it was funny because there’s a sense of impossibility during pregnancy, while at the same time your body is changing so much that things seem possible again! It was a weird pause. That’s what I was going through. At that time, that was the biggest life event for me.

BT:


marks an interesting departure point in the context of your practice, with the performance being staged and organized around the frame of a screen for the first time. Connecting to your most recent moving-image work at the Queen’s Museum in New York, I was wondering if we can talk about the development of your trajectory with moving image.

 was the first time I began with a video work instead of working from the concept of an installation. I think the video came about because I made another friend who is a cinematographer, whom I now work very closely with. It was only after I started to work with him that I realized I could make a video work beyond the consideration of documenting my performances. For me, it’s not about a ‘yes, yes’ mode of making video, where everything is made according to how I want things to be seen. Instead, I need to set a parameter so I can apply my performance techniques within a film set. It’s addressed to a stationary viewer. I guess more and more people are now looking at content on their phones, but I was imagining at the time that people would be looking at this work on a desktop computer or laptop. So, I was really playing with that type of relationship between distance and proximity. That’s why I latched on to this frame idea. What does it mean to have a relationship to the audience in this way? That was a challenge I took on. You’re right that the current piece is maybe the next version of this idea.

BT:
I think this movement between documentation and performance in relation to moving image is an interesting way to think about the fluidity of the line that separates the beginning and end of different works. It’s almost fractal-like, how you work in cycles and repetitions of ideas, objects and themes that appear in separate bodies of your work.

AS:
Sometimes I work in a way where a project is like the side A and then there’s the side B. I also like returning to an idea as a remix to find a new ‘sound’. I don’t really need to look for a theme because much of the work is driven by life itself. Maybe this cyclical process is my way of being open for ideas and themes to gradually emerge. Just like how a riff works in music, how these elements work together and come to the surface at different moments is what makes a performance original or unique. You can find a style by observing the characters of people you are improvising with, too. Then it’s a matter of developing further the compatible mix of these characters while always staying open to things. In a way it’s fractal, as I guess I’m always changing while talking about the same thing. It’s always a different variation on the form of a doughnut, perhaps.



Do Nut Diagram

Ingrid Pollard

Tiffany Sia

2003.
‘Stranger comes to town.’ I’m attending a workshop on how to write scripts for film. The well-known director leading the class is telling us that ‘stranger comes to town’ is the beginning of all good (and bad) films. Throughout the session he keeps repeating this phrase like a chant, clapping and pointing at the ceiling as he says it. He shouts his analysis – which is also his formula – as if he’s stumbling upon it for the first time, incredulous at his discovery and eager to indoctrinate us. As the starting point for movies, I realize he’s dead on: the story is ubiquitous. Even though this workshop happened twenty years ago, I am still as haunted by the director’s basis for narrative as I was at the time. ‘Stranger comes to town’ isn’t just the opening of a movie; it’s also the beginning of imperialism. Everything that follows are its consequences.


1951 / 2017.
In his posthumously published memoir 

, Stuart Hall narrates his journey at age nineteen from ‘Merton’, his family home in Kingston, Jamaica, to study English at Merton College, Oxford University. Hall arrives on the boat train into post-war austerity London in 1951, and notes a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. He imagines this is what ‘assails colonial travellers on first encountering face-to-face the imperial metropole, which they actually know only in its translated form through a colonial haze, but which has always functioned as their “constitutive outside”.’

 Hall’s encounter with things previously understood by their absence and distance is now suddenly present in alarming detail. But a new negation takes place: he describes his previously held impressions not only transformed into illusory after-effects, but also overwritten with a different understanding of what it is to be outside – an outside created through other means of estrangement. ‘Had I been here before?’ asks Hall. ‘Yes and no.’

 The cultural dissonance of becoming British is revealed through a skew of material entanglements, knotted by the migration of peoples whose sense of belonging is bound and split, whose movement is coerced and chosen.


1955 / 2009 / 2022.
‘I’m a stranger in a strange land,’ writes the narrator of Ingrid Pollard’s film 

 (2009/22). Once more, the land is 1950s London, portrayed in the letters of an unnamed newly arrived migrant from the West Indies: ‘The worst part of the climate is the strong, cold breeze that lifts my coat tails and searches me all over.’ Images of cursive loops delicately pattern the compressed economy of airmail paper, gliding across the screen in slender waves. Into this restless to-and-fro of text, Pollard folds snippets of family photo albums. She isolates the minor gestures: hands touching, reaching out to something just beyond the frame, animating what’s not there. An older woman’s voice occasionally surfaces above the ambient soundtrack, recalling places that are never depicted on screen. These sights and sounds are drawn from materials Pollard inherited from her parents after their death. Yet what coheres within 

 is not the uniqueness of biography but the threads of common experience, woven from partial records of people in movement. ‘I wanted these things to be taken seriously,’ Pollard tells me. ‘Official archives collected a lot of people, but didn’t see their stories as a resource. Collective experience is often what’s left out.’


2015 / 2023.
Family histories are often made memorable through the protective carapace of anecdote. This capsule-like form is a mutable blend of particularity and commonality: particular in what makes it personally compelling or distinctive to the person doing the telling, and common in what connects it to a community of listeners. (It is the listener’s evaluation of an anecdote’s contents that determines the success of its inheritance and future circulation.) These minor narratives of social experience speak about places and events rather than spaces and times. They communicate off-record in the register of intimacy, with all its flexibility to move between tenderness, violence and its cautionary capacity for warning.


2022.
In Tiffany Sia’s 

(2022), her mother Mimi recalls moments from her own childhood. A combination of personal memories and ghost stories, these maternal accounts emerge from and hint at the mutating backdrop of 1950s Hong Kong – a city becoming strange to itself and at radical speed. Post-war, post-occupation, returned to British rule, a historic port city on the cusp of sweeping modernization and continually between states of belonging. Mimi Sia speaks of starvation, executions and haunted police stations. Occasionally, she checks in with her listener: ‘In those days, people would say that sometimes behind police stations, you could hear the ritual ringing of a gong. Do you know what that means?’ Presented as intertitle text, these anecdotes are distinct for their unverifiable quality. They interrupt and chafe against a carefully sequenced montage of Hong Kong footage appropriated from British military surveys, troop recordings and touristic souvenirs of technological capture. ‘The film started as an obsession with the travelogue,’ Tiffany Sia tells me. ‘It’s a strange genre, full of clichés, and has a colonial lineage as a kind of template that could be used to dehumanize its subjects.’ The sequence follows that of silent film: shot, shot, title; image, image, text. Yet within that structure, the film captures discrete incidents in which local subjects attempt to stare down the stranger’s lens. Bodies interrupt the frame, grimace at the presence of the camera, conceal themselves or otherwise get in the way of the tourist’s smooth telling. The sequencing leans into this oppositiontoo, by slowing down, zooming in or freeze-framing its subjects in acts of defiance. 

 forensically stretches out moments of resistance in order to scour cinematic fantasies of the past and reduce a viewer’s capacity for nostalgic longing. ‘History is not obedient to what we want to tell out of it,’ Sia says. ‘It presents many inconveniences to ideological narrative.’

Stranger and Stranger

Belonging in Britain

What Rules The Invisible

Isaac Chong Wai

Living and working between Berlin and Hong Kong, Isaac Chong Wai’s interdisciplinary approach spans site-specific performances, video, installation, painting and photography to probe knowledge systems, histories, continual societal shifts and global phenomena poetically and conceptually. Chong attends to the centrality of the body in shaping understandings of who we are and the world around us to explore themes dealing with powerlessness, violence, collectivism, leaderlessness and mourning.

 (which translates as New Guard), we see the artist filmed from behind, breathing onto a pane of glass from the viewpoint of Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre, gradually obscuring the image of the Neue Wache building beyond and the renowned sculpture 

 (1937–38) by Käthe Kollwitz that is exhibited inside. The Neue Wache was originally built in 1818 for Frederick William III of Prussia as a royal guardhouse and memorial to the 1813 wars against France. In the years since, the building’s memorial function was rededicated numerous times from the perspective of different political affiliations: it functioned as a memorial to the victims of the First World War, as a site for commemorative celebrations by the Nazi armed forces and, in East Germany, as a memorial to the victims of fascism. Since 1993 it has served as the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Victims of War and Dictatorship.


Chong’s edited video collects the traces of his breath on the window, eventually covering the entire scene. The work probes how, in the present, we continuously seek to preserve and commemorate the past. 


 (2015), breath serves as a metaphor for past lives, and also to refer to an intrinsic relationship we have to the world, of breathing as a marker of being alive. In this video, you used breath to blur and mask the rear facade of the Neue Wache building in Berlin. The building houses an enlarged replica of 

 by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). The then German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s choice of Kollwitz’s pietà gave rise to a lengthy and lively discussion on whether it was a suitable memorial to the victims of the Nazis, particularly as the original sculpture was made in 1937–38 in response to the First World War. How did you first arrive at using breath as a painting tool and as a metaphor for the blurring of the visible and invisible?



Isaac Chong Wai: 
I was working at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, and one of its windows faces the back of the building housing the memorial by Kollwitz. I worked there during the winter, and, as for everyone who visits the theatre and views the Neue Wache from this position, traces of one’s breath are left on the glass, blurring what is seen. This was the beginning of the work: breathing on the glass pane of the window and imagining how this blurry image reflects hazy memories of people. It also extends to connotations such as how, as human beings, we need the living body in order to remember.


I tried different ideas when making the work, and you can see from the video that my movement, from left to right, mimics reading or even writing, although you don’t see any text. Maybe this can also be likened to a paintbrush moving across a canvas slowly and building up or accumulating paint in a way that blurs, but at the same time creates, an image.



JD: 
I’m interested in how you use something as ephemeral as breath to create new meaning, particularly by obscuring or distorting what is seen, and how that relates to the written and the drawn, the said and the unsaid, and the body as well.



ICW: 
I was thinking of mortality and breathing, and the way breath comes and goes. It is ephemeral. But then, of course, the video has been edited so that this action I initially carry out is made permanent. Every single frame in the video was edited so that the vestiges of each breath remain, until the entire shot blurs the image of the memorial beyond. The work is reflecting on the ephemerality of the human body. I’m not saying that each breath ‘represents’ a body or a life; it’s more about the quality or the attributes of the body and how this connects to memory and building something to aid acts of remembering. 


We build things through architecture: a building to memorialize, a sculpture in tribute. In this video I deal with the transient nature of breath and use it to build a collage, but this collage is one that’s impossible to achieve in the physical or real world. In the end, it’s an artificially created collage, and somehow, by creating in this manner, ephemeral traces come together to make this overall blurring possible. When I say blurring, I am also referring to the blurring of memory. How is the body forgetting while simultaneously trying to remember?

JD:
You’ve alluded to this active way of giving permanence to something that isn’t permanent. As we’ve discussed, breath is an indicator of life, and this really speaks to a notion of being present in a moment. The work is performative and about absence and presence; it also, importantly, probes the conditions of memory work by asking who is remembered and who is memorialized through architecture, through buildings and monuments. In your use of breath to blur out a memorial honouring war victims, perhaps we can think of breath as a form of resistance in the shadow of war and loss of life. Given the current debates and contestation around monuments and monumentality, do you frame this work as a form of protest? Maybe protest isn’t quite the right word, but is the gesture of breathing to erase a prominent monument a catalyst for reconsidering the things we remember and the people we immortalize through public sculptures, particularly as this relates to a war memorial in this instance?



ICW: 
I believe there are certain forms of resistance in the work, whilst trying, as you say, to make the ephemeral permanent. Addressing the idea of performance, this often comes up as a reading of the work due to the involvement of the body. This is quite different from how sculpture as memory works. There’s still a performative element, related to how people behave in front of sculptures – quiet, contemplative, sad. I was thinking more about how one can engage with history, as well as how to dispute or contest it. How blurry history is, and the fact that we are asked to remember, but who are we actually remembering? Victims who have no faces; some, we don’t even know their names. What exactly are we remembering when a memorial calls upon us to remember? I’m not saying that I’m offering an answer in the work, but it’s trying to question the involvement of the body in acts of remembering and the politics involved in the process.



JD: 
You described the movement from left to right as mimicking different modes of communicating, like writing, reading or painting. There’s also a sequential repetition occurring as you increasingly blur the back of the monument with your breath. Your back is also turned away from the viewer until you walk away from the frame: we don’t usually see the reverse of statues and monument, we face them. We behave, as you rightly identify, composed and respectful, particularly around war memorials and sites representing traumas. At the beginning of the film, it looks as if you’re looking for or anticipating something; gradually, however, by following your movements, we begin to notice this blurring out of the window. Your video is silent. We just see your body. We don’t hear any sound; we don’t hear the physicality of your actions. What was your decision-making in removing the sound of you breathing onto the glass?



ICW: 
When I was editing the video, I didn’t think too much about sound. I always felt that it wasn’t needed when I was considering the work. Why? I would say that probably the inference comes from memorials or ritualistic performance and how, when it comes to mourning and paying homage to victims, we often use silence. In reality, though, these spaces are never completely silent – it’s more that we don’t speak and are still, but you’ll still hear people breathing. I also didn’t want people to focus on the voice or sound I was making and instead focus on the image.



JD: 
I’m interested in what you’ve said about sound and silence because when we look at histories of performance art and durational performance, there’s often a lot of emphasis on sound and changes in sound or breath over performances that take place over a period of time, and documenting that. I’m thinking here of durational works from the 1970s and 1980s like the joint work by Marina Abramović and Ulay, 

One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)

 and so on. I wondered why there is an absence of sound, when its presence would give a sense of the physicality of the repeated gestures we see in the video.



ICW: 
I wasn’t aiming to document a performance with 

; it was more about looking at what kind of image I could create through this action of breathing onto a glass window. Could this mean it has performative elements to it? Yes. In this and my other video works, I use silence quite often. Perhaps the works dictate it.



JD: 
Silence’s centrality and an absence of sound determined by the work itself.



ICW: 
Yes, I’m still working through why this recurs.



 is performed for the camera. I’m interested in knowing more about your relationship to performance art and how the work offers an embodied viewing experience for audiences following your movements and gestures onscreen.



ICW: 
When I have an intention to create a video piece that includes performative elements – whether through movements, gestures or postures – because it is witnessed by the camera, I don’t have audience interaction in my mind or a sense of an audience. It’s quite different from performing live for an audience, where there’s a certain intensity resulting from performer–audience interactions. With video, as we discussed previously, there’s this idea of permanence through capturing on film, and there are a lot of other things such as sound and editing that become absolute. Live performance doesn’t allow for that, and it’s a space I’m still working on and navigating.

JD: 
It’s been eight years since you made this work, and in that time there has been extensive debate about monuments and monumentality globally: calls for the falling of monuments, particularly of problematic and contested figures memorialized in public spaces. When you made this work, you were sort of responding to a specific context and a specific time in your life. But your video is now framed against this wider debate, at a time when a critical eye is being cast on the subject – a rethinking of monumentality and who is being memorialized. How do we engage with this idea of constructing public monuments to represent or evoke collective memory? And how did you approach this as someone who is not German, although you’ve now lived in Germany for many years?



ICW: 
The first thing that comes to mind is how traditional monuments are often sited in very vast public spaces, and the monuments themselves are typically life- or larger-than-life-sized. It suggests a kind of projection whereby we use our own bodies as a prototype to create another body, in another material, so that it can remain permanent and last forever. But in doing so, I think we forget that our bodies themselves are the memorial. This is one of the reasons performance come into play in this context: not necessarily to challenge monuments, but at least to serve as a way of recognizing or questioning this romantic idea of permanence. There needs to be a critical review of this human idea of the body’s permanence, and our arrogance towards histories as permanent.
