ai. gallery
1a Tenter Ground, London, E1 7NH
About this Event
UNDERTOW·FERAL·REGROUND
A new performance by Liu Xuan (b.1991, China; living between Jiangxi & London), together with dancers Jaheim Nelson and Abbie Garmany. This will be presented during the final week of our current group exhibition Spectral Kinship, curated by Sophie Guo.
This is a site specific response to the new works within the context of the unique gallery space. Ritual takes on sonic and kinetic form in the sculptures of Liu Xuan.
The performance unfolds as an act of reclaiming embodied perception, peeling back layers of estrangement to awaken the feral and the sacred within the body. Taking its cue from the poetic lines ‘I give you the end of a golden string / Only wind it into a ball’, it invokes ritual to weave anew the bonds between self, others and earth.
Named after the heroine of Dvořák’s opera, the Voice of Rusalka recalls the water nymph who relinquishes her voice to attain human form and love. For Liu, it offers a means of facing childhood trauma and restoring voice to both Rusalka and the artist herself. Liu assembles horn, wood and oil palm from her home province of Jiangxi with glutinous rice paste, cashew lacquer and scrap metal salvaged from Fengcheng’s recycling industry, forming a wounded, siren-like body of animal, vegetable and industrial matter. Weaving and lacquering further embed the work in embodied technologies of making historically rooted in the agrarian rituals of her hometown. The pull of a cord animates the sculpture and sets the bronze bells ringing, returning Rusalka’s lost voice as a ritualistic soundscape that reverberates through the gallery. Liu’s new kinetic sculptures carry the healing power of sound into more relational forms: two oscillate between attraction and repulsion, drawn together and prised apart in turn, so that intimacy is never free of struggle, nor shedding a former self without friction.
Event venue & nearby stays
ai. gallery, 1a Tenter Ground, London, United Kingdom
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