Lisa Pang: It all begins with soap

AT10: Articulate turns Ten – group exhibition

Articulate project space, 19 December 2020 – 3 January 2021

It all begins with soap 

Here we are, we open the door, go in and begin the rituals. We register ourselves, checking in and performing hand sanitisation. Maybe we also wear a facemask and we are definitely conscious of maintaining a 1.5 m distance from others. It is pandemic season and announcing one’s identity, hygiene and personal space are on show in the gallery for the annual exhibition AT10: Articulate Turns Ten at Articulate project space, celebrating ten years of spatial and experimental art practice in its location at Parramatta Rd. Leichhardt. 

Let us wash. A strong smell of soap with its associations of washing and cleanliness assail you once inside, and while an orderly installation of bars and bowls of creamy soap are familiar and ought to be comforting, the carved statements they spell out are not, sowing seeds of doubt about welcome in that place for anyone who has heard them (Alan Shacher, You Don’t Know Me From a Bar of Soap!). Reflecting on a wider narrative beyond that stark domestic contrast invoked by Shacher’s choice of materials: white soap and black shoe polish, is another loaded text work, a diptych quietly but emphatically hanging above, inviting dissection of word and meaning (Vilma Bader, Blackout). Works engaging with the socio-political and cultural and visual contexts of text and language continue within. A painting with a gridded composition functions through a colour-square system to translate an artist’s aphorism (Kate Mackay, Language Is A Virus – Laurie Anderson). Apparent seasonal greetings are conveyed by a string of crystal ball-baubles, but the adjacent noticeboard speaks of veering between horror and jollity (Sue Callanan, Ho! Ho! Ho! : Ha! Ha! Ha!).

Let us look. Perception is very often altered by one’s viewpoint, and there is a convention within painting, and the vernacular of abstraction to reference a window as a device. Through a window, framing and transparency are means of directing gaze and the visual dilemma of looking through / at. This is particularly pronounced in the many angles and coloured surfaces bluntly offered by Susan Andrews’ Orange Lip, glimpsed at in the ambiguous angled spaces of Barbara Halnan’s Pages and suggested by the ephemeral layering, placement and tapes of Michelle Le Dain’s Square. Explorations of rectilinearity through paint and colour continue. Sarah Fitzgerald’s The Three Graces is a small and delicate tempera and wax painting alluding to a historical subject. Diane McCarthy’s Orphans in the Storm diptych is a muted colour study anchored by a grid. Coming off the canvas and onto a domestic textile, a complex layering and weaving of paint with found colour finds a softened, domestic expression (Nicole Ellis, Double-Check 4), while upstairs in a dramatically lit corner, monochromatic planes incline, suggesting ways of reconfiguring space (Beata Gayer, Tango). Referencing the regular while allowing for the insinuation of tactile materiality to emerge; paint flecks sit, somehow uncomfortably, on a felt surface (Tamsin Salehian, Untitled) while the seriality of a triptych frames an unlikely combination of human hair, folded plastic and hessian (Philippa Hagon, Continuum).

Let us look within, and close to home. Unexpected conflations of materials and methods offer alternate and temporal metaphors and meanings, lending poignancy to re-contextualised objects. My work conflates dumpling-folding techniques with priming a canvas for painting (Lisa Pang, Paintless Paintings (i) gyoza (ii) bao (iii) combination). Substitution and surrogacy of materials effectively creates a space of subversive domesticity; present in Jane Burton Taylor’s re-imagined wallpaper square (Wallpaper – After Agnes) and in the soft pillows scattered in piles, featuring transferred psychological-response imagery (Fiona Kemp, Now I Lay You Down). Elsewhere, tucked under the stairs, there is comfort in the manufactured domesticity of a comfortable chair, a lamp to read by and a bookshelf filled with proffered books (Ella Dreyfus, Help Yourself!). Drawing back and looking at the house and home at a remove, as a container of people, are Jan Handel’s analytical series of drawings on house-building materials (HOUSE (contain / er).

Residues, collaged and combined assemblages evocative of domestic life continue to pervade other works, indicative perhaps of the lengthy lockdown time we spent at home this year (Sue Pedley  & Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Line Work). Elizabeth Rankin’s Fabrications of Linda is a painted portrait pinned, primped, plaited fussed and worried over, much like the frustrating elusivity of the crime represented.  Che Ritz presents a series of detailed drawings evocative of absent sound (and freer times) in Distortion 2020 Homage to Effects Pedals creative process endless possibilities live music and free spirits. Elke Wohlfahrt in Beyond Stitching I-IV has made forms that are bound and gathered from upholstery offcuts and other things.

Let us look without. In a similar spirit of free wheeling play using domestic materials to hand, Gary Warner has fashioned the sonic event generator for gallery wall from consumer packaging waste materials. Waste is also upcycled as colourful, yet sinister plastic assemblages by Rox De Luca in Blue, green, yellow absurdity. Finds of plastic on Sydney beaches lead us to anxious contemplation of the fragility of our environment and the wall drawing by Parris Dewhurst, Ephemeral Landscape, to be gradually erased over the course of the exhibition, expresses that concern. Loss of landscape through fire devastation was a recent reality and Juliet Fowler Smith’s Koala up a tree uncannily resembles a giant match. Commentary upon and objects recalling last summer’s bushfires are filmic and visual reminders of that stark experience (Mahalya Middlemist, Reverse Bushfire #2 & Noelene Lucas, Black Earth) with recovery an enduring hope (Sonja Karl, Rebounding Buds). 

Let us move. Rather than facilitating one’s movement in the space, some works function to direct or hinder passage, calling attention to the significance and value we place in free movement and expectations of behaviour (Raymond Matthews, Boundaries & Murray and Burgess, Hazard). Wider movements of people and the function of borders, topical subjects these days, are explored through the pokerwork drawing by Kendal Heyes, Dover. Imagery and accessibility of travel also seemed to become more localised this year, and the call of wide open spaces as a road trip experience is evoked by photographic work (Molly Wagner, It’s all happened before… & Steven Fasan Somewhere). Bonita Ely’s The Tenth Coolest Suburb in the World is a celebration of the local as destination, and travel as a state of mind. Anke Stäcker’s Random Discoveries is just that, a presentation of street photography through street names, all female, randomly found.

Let us connect. The collaborative and performative impulse is realised through works made and manipulated online (Isobel Johnston & Jude Crawford) and through the virtual participation of one artist from Germany (Beta Bruder, Breakfast with Beta). A still from a previous collaboration in the space lingers on like a memory (Voices of Women, Lliane Clarke). Yearning for human contact and touch is gently and profoundly realised by the video work, Untitled [Distant Near] by Renay Pepita & Michael Ward. The screen placed low on the floor reveals a body turning and curling in the same site, recorded during lockdown. It is a solo by a usually participatory performer and its melancholic soundtrack seeps into the room and the mood.

Let us be. Sometimes, things are not as they seem. Several works in the show position themselves to play with concepts of reproducibility, duplication, and so, identity and context. Anya Pesce’s signature material-process of hand moulded acrylic sits beside an image of itself, linked by a bright gesture in neon (Cobalt Blue Form with Orange Paint 1). Another printed image reveals its constituent pigments as a spilt gesture (Curtis Ceapa, LLKMLCLKMKCMY). Sue Murray’s large scale painting Orange Tupperware magnifies and mirrors the multiple-use plastic domestic icon. All questioning the place and role of objects and representation.

It may be artistic shibboleth to say that art holds up a mirror to the world, but here it is, these works, this space and our movement within it reflecting and indeed articulating much that has happened and is happening in our age. Or we could say that these contemporary and contemporaneous works are interpreted as analyses and musings because, 2020. It has been a tumultuous year for humanity. We see this, because we have lived with and debated over these things. Cleanliness and colour politics. Framed and mediated points of view. Expansion of the domestic sphere. Movement of people. Things taken for granted. Things questioned. The space for kindness and community. Look up. Margaret Roberts’ work TEST2 hangs on the axis of Articulate project space, marking its internal linear division. A black fabric form, an interpretation of half a painting made by another artist in another tumultuous age, the other (white) portion of the painting left unarticulated, as Roberts says, to dissolve into its invisible space. 

To Every Age Its Art. To Every Art Its Freedom.

Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)

December 2020

With thanks to Articulate project space and its community of artists,

dedicated to spatial and experimental arts practices.

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AT10 ROOMSHEET

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Articulate Turns Ten opens Saturday 19 December 2-5pm

Opening Saturday 19 December 2-5pm

Open 11-5pm Friday - Sunday

19 December - 3 January

(closed 25-26 December)

 AT10 ROOMSHEET

All AT10 posts

Articulate Turns Ten celebrates 10 years of spatial and experimental art practice with an exhibition of new and recent work by artists who have shown at Articulate previously. It acknowledges all the artists who have exhibited in that time, and the community that supports it.

Artists showing in Articulate Turns Ten are Susan Andrews, Vilma  Bader, Bettina Bruder,  Mandy Burgess and Ro Murray, Jane Burton Taylor, Curtis Ceapa, Sue Callanan, Rox De Luca, Parris Dewhurst, Ella Dreyfus, Nicole Ellis, Bonita Ely, Steven Fasan, Sarah Fitzgerald, Juliet Fowler Smith, Beata Geyer, Simone Griffin, Philippa Hagon, Barbara Halnan, Jan Handel, Kendal Heyes, Isobel Johnston and Jude Crawford, Sonja Karl, Fiona Kemp, Michelle Ledain, Noelene Lucas, Kate Mackay, Diane McCarthy, Mahalya Middlemist, Raymond Matthews, Sue Murray, Sue Pedley and  Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Renay Pepita, Anya Pesce, Elizabeth Rankin, Che Ritz, Margaret Roberts, Tamsin Salehian, Alan Schacher, Lisa Sharp, Anke Stacker, Helen L Sturgess, Voices of Women (Lliane Clarke), Molly Wagner, Gary Warner and Elke Wohlfahrt 

Design: Maddy Menca

Susan Andrews

Alan Schacher

Lisa Pang

Conditions of entry to the exhibition:

There are limited places in Articulate due to COVID restrictions. 

Please stay at home if you’re unwell.
Stay at home if you’ve been in contact with a known or suspected COVID-19 case.
Use the hand sanitisers provided at the entrance to Articulate.
Fill in your contact tracing information on entry to Articulate.

Maintain 1.5 metres distance from other people or wear a face mask.

Articulate Turns Nine opened tonight

Open 11am-5pm 7 - 22 December

ROOMSHEET

Lisa Sharp, Lesley Giovanelli, Michelle LeDain

Virginia Hilyard

Lesley Giovanelli

Sarah Woodward, Margaret Roberts, Jennifer O'Brien

Nola Farman 

left: Mireille Eid; right: Emma Wise

Emma Wise (performed by Ella Dreyfus)

Adrian Hall

Chantal Grech

Paul Sutton & Steve Simpson

Sue Callanan, Jane Burton Taylor

photos: Margaret Roberts

Final Weekend coming up of Articulate Turns Eight

Articulate Turns Eight celebrates eight years of support for spatial and experimental art practices with an exhibition of new work by artists who have shown at Articulate during that time.

Open Friday to Sunday, 11-5pm till 23 December 

ROOMSHEET

Artists exhibiting in Articulate Turns Eight are Alison Clouston, Anya Pesce, Ambrose Reisch, Anke Stäcker, Asher Millgate, Barbara Halnan, Beata Geyer, Bettina Bruder, Bill Moseley, Brigitta Gallaher, Caitlin Hespe, Chantal Grech, Ebony Secombe, Elizabeth Ashburn, Elizabeth Hogan, Elizabeth Rankin, Elke Wohlfahrt, Ella Dreyfus, Fiona Kemp, Genevieve Carroll, Jane Burton Taylor, Jeff Wood, Jenee O’Brien, Jody Graham, Julian Day, Juliet Fowler Smith, Kate Mackay, Laine Hogarty, LInden Braye, Lisa Andrew and Rachel Buckeridge, Lisa Sharp, Liz O’Reilly, Mandy Burgess, Margaret Roberts, Michael Jalaru Torres, Mireille Eid, Molly Wagner, Nadia Odlum, Noelene Lucas, Nola Farman, Pam Kleemann, Parris Dewhurst, Paul Sutton, Renay Pepita, Ro Murray, Ros Cook, Rox De Luca, Sarah Woodward, Sardar Sinjawi, Sonja Karl, Steven Cavanagh, Steven Fasan, Sue Callanan, Sue Pedley, Suzanne Bartos, Vilma Bader and Virginia Hilyard.

See more AT8 here

Juliet Fowler Smith

L-R:  Genevieve Carroll , Margaret Roberts, Molly Wagner, Jane Burton Taylor

foreground L-R: Mandy Burgess, Sue Callanan, Linden Braye, Jeff Wood, Lisa Sharp, Beata Geyer

foreground L-R: Lisa Andrew and Rachel Buckeridge, Chantal Grech, Fiona Kemp, Kate MacKay,  Jody Graham

L-R: Ebony Secombe, Jody Graham, Noelene Lucas, Mireille Eid, Alison Clouston

foreground: Laine Hogarty, bckground: L Elzabeth Rankin, R: Sarah Woodward

Photos Peter Murphy

Lisa Sharp writes on t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s

WeiZen Ho

t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s

at Articulate project space, 497 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt, 15 – 25 March 2018

This piece is written in three parts; the first after some research in anticipation of meeting WeiZen, the second after we had met; while she was in the process of making the installation for her performance and the third after seeing her perform.

Part 1: Anticipation

She walks not

Even before meeting this inter-disciplinary performing artist I have been captivated by an image of her in mid-performance. Filling the frame of the shot, a Chinese woman lies belly-down on a wheeled platform, appearing to propel herself along the floor by the sweeping, claw-like actions of her bare and muscular arms. Her legs drag behind her. On her face is an expression of such strength and intrigue I have read it over and over many times, trying to find a meaning. I can’t. It could be anything from admonishment to pain to possession to otherworldly knowingness, maybe even a species of mirth, but it is certainly fuelled by sheer grit and endurance. If eyes alone could speak … but no, in performance art it is the entire body that narrates, and in this image WeiZen Ho walks not, but drags herself. Then again, while legs and feet may not power her, she has wheels, and she rolls smoothly and efficiently, paradoxically (but so effectively) speaking with a look, from a traditionally disempowered space, or actual ‘platform’; lying low and horizontally.

This is the power of performance art, and specifically for Ho’s practice, the use of the visceral body and its movement and location in space (or site) as material. In much the same way as a visual artist would use material such as charcoal or paint, here it is the body and its abstract movements in space that relate her particular interest in exploring socio-cultural histories, translated and expressed through her body, as performance. The histories-as-performances are drawn from her own lineage, and beyond, accessing a variety of cultural practices across East Asia; some localised, some carried along by diaspora and others an intermingling somewhere between the two (as is typical of much of this part of sea-connected Asia). WeiZen has spun her performances from the influence of local folklore and mythology frequently interwoven with migration, colonial, feminist and local features. Her solo performance series Stories from the Body (#1-4) 2014 – 16 and performed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and here in Australia presented such powerfully fraught and fractured encounters. In each piece the concept of mediumship was central to her conception, and ultimately, performance.

WeiZen’s current collaborative arts project, t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s continues this interest in the performative body as medium. It specifically references her encounters with rituals of possession, shamanism and animism encountered directly in her research and travels over a two-year period to Sabah, Malaysia and Hanoi, Vietnam. The project’s culmination was the installation at Articulate project space, ultimately realised in a series of performances in March 2018.

WeiZen Ho, Stories from the Body #5 (PLATFORM 2017) at Articulate project space Photographer: Vsevolod  Vlaskine (15 July 2017)

Part 2: installation

She articulates

I meet WeiZen, finally on a Friday. WeiZen and I it turns out, come from the same part of South East Asia and also share a similar cultural history in that we are descendants of Chinese people who fled into what was then British Malaya in the wake of political conflicts. There is a frisson as I discover that WeiZen has visited my hometown Kota Kinabalu, as part of her research trip to Malaysia as well as Hanoi in Vietnam.  She has been driven by an interest in researching and witnessing the rituals around trance and possession, rituals that are also a shadowy part of her own socio-cultural history, shaped by time, place and perspective. While in Sabah, she spent time with the indigenous Orang Rungus people from Kampung Minyak, and it is their own whispered description of the origin of their characteristic dance movements that provided the genesis for the title, t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s.[1] WeiZen whispers the actual words the Rungus used, pre-translation, orang halus itu and I am grateful to hear it, for the blanketing sensation of a familiar language, spoken with its rolling r’s, guttural ngs, s liaison and also for the evocation of a distant mirage in which barely discernible figures, the subtle beings move with delicacy and deliberation among a thick jungle.

t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s - all lower case, with spaces between the letters. The concept, so eloquently expressed in text, suggests a physical conflation of democratic markers and open spaces. We all have bodies in which we collect lived experiences, yet it is the pauses between actions, the spaces between the trees, the silence among noise, the absences where we are open, and where something may happen. Perhaps a space created for performance, as medium, or as vehicle for possession. In her reflective essay Potus Sedere, WeiZen elaborates on the nature of space as absence, a generative and fertile place for her to work from.

there is the notion of possession as the filling in of, and meditating on, many kinds of absences. It makes me wonder about the kinds of qualitative states that may make possession possible: mental vulnerability, uncertainty of social identity, lack of access to deeper communion or devotional spaces, … the thinning veil between life and death, the need for empowerment, unbelonging, dislocation, displacement and uprooting.[2]

As a performing artist, her interest is in the point where the performance of ritual-like experiences of being possessed becomes a transformative experience for both the performer and the onlooker. Her intent is to reach beyond the passive performative model and arrive at an active performance, in which the audience is engaged with her actions. An essential aspect of her practice is the continual refinement of a minimally conceived performance methodology; enabling a large part of each performance to be open to improvisation, experimentation and a collaboration of sorts. In person, WeiZen is animated, eloquent and expansive. As we talk she shows me a gesture of her arm, see how much more interesting this movement is (an awkward twisting gesticulation), compared with this (this time, a graceful, balletic flourish). In this I imagine her performance to come, likely to challenge my role as viewer, for her preference for the awkward over ease, in bodily expression as well as conceptual intent.

The first phase of the presentation of the t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s at Articulate project space, was an installation in progress. Built gradually over the weeks, it was at once a nest, a building site in transition and a suspenseful stage for the performance to come. The work utilised distinct imagery and material as a response to the research areas. In response to WeiZen’s encounters with the bobohizans of Sabah were hair sculptures, both human and synthetic, loosely spiralled on the walls, suspended in clumps and occasionally entangled with vegetation.[3] These abject vestiges of the body evoked a strange simultaneity of repulsion and attraction. A costume resembling an enlarged slice of skin, with horsehair filaments sprouting outwards is displayed nearby. Elsewhere, and among these bodily items were reflective surfaces and motifs – these were WeiZen’s responses to the witnessing of Len Dong rituals in Hanoi and they were installed to invite participatory actions from the audience.[4] The reflective surfaces act to mirror viewers in the performance along with the artist. In addition to the hair and reflective elements, the proposed performances were to also utilise text, sound, sound circuitry, movement, vocals and video.

So the next phase of the project was to move into the series of performances. She walks not but articulates as performance, those s u b t l e b e I n g s, as WeiZen herself says, coming from a basic premise that “all of human living is performed”.[5]

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (installation detail) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (installation participation) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

Part 3: Performance

She shakes, she speaks, she transcends

I saw the last and final of four performances, held on a Saturday night. The performances had been conceived in relation to the space, which was in turn carefully prepared by the artist and her collaborators as a series of installations and video projections. We were directed to move through the space via three distinct performance pieces, or cumulative phases, all of which evoked aspects of possession and mediumship, cloaked in ritual.

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (installation detail) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

At the point of entry ritual helpers received us. These women explained practical details of the performance it had the effect of of clarity and welcome. The gesture was one of kindness. The first performance took place at the far end of the downstairs space, reached by traversing past a video taken in Sabah – and the characteristic percussive gong sounds followed our progress, past the hair installation, which had grown in number, thickness and metaphoric potential. There, by the shrine and a kneeling ritual assistant, we waited, until the heavy anticipation broke and she appeared. Her body, slight and naked, evoked empathy. She was helped into – or onto – the skin-piece – a prosthesis glued directly on to her body. Her long hair was unbound and loosened. Somehow, the fragile projecting filaments of hair from the front of the costume echoed this unfettering gesture and guided her first, tentative actions. Her movements were small, light, subtle as air currents, which she sniffed audibly, her head nodding, swaying, absorbed and apparently oblivious to the audience. Conversely, her arms and hands, held behind the body, wrist to reversed wrist, started to tremble violently, suggest binding or physical resistance. Some, though not all, of her movements stood out to me, hinting at indigenous dance movements local to Borneo. Among a pile of dried leaves on the floor, her toes curled and crawled. There was a walk – of tiny shuffling steps – in which the inner and outer soles of the feet were used and a singular moment when her bare heel extended and knocked on the floor. These were disparate, truncated, remnant actions, broken parts of a language of the body offered up haltingly, not spoken fluently or with grace. This performance closed abruptly when the ritual assistant, who had been holding her, loudly slapped her on the back, propelling her forward and stumblingly into space.

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (performance) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

For the second phase of the performance, we were ushered upstairs, with script in hand, to gather among a minimal architectural assemblage. Suspended from above, sheets of reflective film were positioned around simple timber benches, and a line of red cloaks (another aspect of audience participation). In a change of costume, she wore a shimmering double-layered skirt which she pulled up over her head, transforming herself into bodily geometry; an inverted double triangle. In doing this she turned herself into a symbol: becoming a moving, vocalising figure of speech. She uttered loudly and occasionally through the fabric, materially present, but with muffled voice and face masked. This is where language was first uttered, and to hear spoken English was a little unsettling, though the words and phrases were not coherent communication but more of a verbal flourishing. In our earlier discussion, WeiZen had described it as an unreadable text. Traditions of absurdist theatre were evoked and the audience was invited to take part, in groups of three parts;

perpetual purgator(Y that

expels A foretelling

bared witH ebonian

slumbeR crowing

 insipidnesS …

and so we intoned in a group incantation, over, through and among other spoken threads. This known or more familiar format of performance was cut with the unknown; she also voiced gutturally, in deep reverberations followed by upward arcs into melancholic strains that suggested the plaintive strains of Chinese opera. Once I thought I heard the circling rise of the Imam’s call to prayer before it dissolved into something else. Aside from the vocal elements, she moved among us, using eye contact and issuing pronouncements – prophetically delivered. Like her bodily movements in the first part of the performance, this was not fluent masterful language but chopped and dislocated parts of utterance. She was with us, but not really, the effect was of a lighthouse beam turning, illuminating something and then moving on. Her movements here, upstairs and with sound were a contrast as they were confident and assured. Without hesitation she climbed a bench, hugged a corner, strode out and spoke up.

  

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (performance) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (performance) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod  Vlaskine (March 2018)

Having moved from a bodily to a vocal emphasis we were readied for the final performance. During a break, ritual assistants handed out glasses of subtly scented water. So it was with the taste of cucumber-infusion in our mouths, that the final and most dynamic phase of the performance began. She descended downstairs and we, her audience watched, mostly from above, looking down. This juxtaposition suggested disempowerment, an inversion of the raised stage or at the very least dislocation, and cast her in a somewhat abject position relative to her audience. This was amplified as she removed her shirt, crawled on to a reflective rectangle and flipped her hair forward so that a video projection was cast directly on to her naked back. At once she became a fleshy part of the black and white scene. With her hands she took her hair and began to use it. She filled her mouth with hair – a silencing act. She then began to wipe her hair over the flickering images on the floor, appearing to clean, erase or perhaps polish the surface/screen in slow and deliberate actions. With this action, she created a layered temporal ritual in which she occupied, in the one moment. different stratas of time; the past time of the film and the present time of the performance collapsed into one. Connecting these layered temporalities were a lineage of women; the woman on the floor, the women in the projection, indeed all the women who have gone before in performing these traditionally feminised actions, of cleaning, grooming and sewing. In one particularly poignant moment, she produced a large needle and started to sew her hair. Simultaneously, the video image showed another woman tossing her hair. Social, feminine and personal rituals collided. This compression provided a powerful visual narration of mediumship as a type of lineage. Notably, the use of and reference to hair connected us back to the beginning, to the clumped, severed and disembodied hair display forming the hair installation.

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (performance) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

 

WeiZen Ho, t h e s u b t l e b e I n g s (performance) at Articulate project space

Photographer: Vsevolod Vlaskine (March 2018)

In a forum subsequent to the performance, one of the ritual helper performers, Damian Oliver offered an insight into interpreting the three performances and the three personas.[6] He thought of them as a movement from the pre-personal, to the personal and then to the trans-personal. So in this work WeiZen Ho moves perhaps from performative representations of being. Initially, of existence without identity – mere stirrings of consciousness. Then, the use of language (loaded with all its own heavy histories) – a socially communicative being. Finally, she enacts a multi-tiered plurality of being - transcendence. This interpretation lends a progressive analysis, in that the performances are enacted as a series of ritual transformations (via possession or mediumship) that are layered and cumulative in effect.

So now I have traversed the many faces of her, this WeiZen Ho, from interpreting that initial image, to meeting, talking and walking with her, to witnessing her perform as three hers. Like the enigma generated by that first fixed gaze, her performance work, like most good and interesting art, defies a singular explanation but instead opens up an expanse for interpretation, originating as it does from a similarly expansive field, a hybridization of personal history, place-specific research and socio-cultural ritual.

I want, saya mahu, to go, pergi ke, there, sana …

Lisa Sharp

April 2018

All images courtesy of the artist WeiZen Ho and the photographer Vsevelod Vlaskine.

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[1] WeiZen Ho, ‘Imageries in response to Sabah, East Malaysia’ post on www.weizenho.com http://www.weizenho.com/performance-installationinprogress/ posted June 27, 2017

[2] WeiZen Ho, ‘Potus Sedere’ in Part of the Stories from the Body Performance Series; Rabbit 20 – Dance, A Journal for Non-fiction Poetry, RMIT, 2017, pp. 86 - 97 at 90.

[3] A Bobohizan is term for high priestess, a ritual specialist and a spirit medium in Kadazan-Dusun pagan rites: Wikipedia.

[4] Lên đồng is a ritual practiced in Vietnamese folk religion and the mother goddess religion Đạo Mẫu, in which followers become spirit mediums for various deities: Wikipedia.

[5] WeiZen Ho, ‘Potus Sedere’ Op. Cit. at 92.

[6] Damian Oliver, collaborator and ritual helper in t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s performance.