Performance view by the river Weser / Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst. © Jimmi Liu, 2023
performance (text, laser beam, electronics, speaker)
A knot was spotted between earth and sky, breaking the horizon together-apart, turning the boundaries between the inside and outside into one. The knot can only be seen and heard under precise angles and atmospheric conditions. (...)
From across the river, the artist reads a poem into a device that converts voice (sound) waves into light. The beam crosses the river and scatters in the atmospheric conditions in between, transformed by the indeterminacy of sunlight, rain, wind, and the movements in between. Once on the other side, the light waves are transformed back into voice in the present, this time together with the world in between.
In the performance, the artist is displaced from the exhibition space into a state of unknowability: unable to witness the space in which the audience can hear his voice. The audience, on the other hand, is placed in a position of unknowability by a voice reciting a text that simultaneously appeals to fact and fiction, luring them into imagining a knot discovered in the space they are in. They search. The artist stands. Could such a performative displacement between artist-researcher and audience have paradoxically made their positions indeterminate instead?
Performance view at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst. © Jimmi Liu, 2023
Performance view at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst. © Jimmi Liu, 2023
Performance view at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst. © Jimmi Liu, 2023
Performance view by the river Weser / Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst. © Jimmi Liu, 2023
Further iterations of the performance:
Performance conducted during the opening of "Three Degrees of Im/possiblity" at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst. © Jimmi Liu, 2023
Performance conducted during a PhD Colloquium at the Tropical Terrace within Hortus botanicus Leiden. © Emily Huurdeman, 2023
Acknowledgements: Developed during the "Crystal Room" residency at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, 2023, with support from the Binational Artistic PhD-Program at the HfK Bremen.