Lightbody series

I’ve been working on a new video series entitled Lightbody series. The video works are compilations of recent performances I have documented.

Lightbody I, 2019, single channel video: 1.09 seconds looped.

Performer: Soleil Harvey

Lightbody II, 2019, two-channel video: 59 seconds looped.

Performer: Soleil Harvey

While developing these pieces, I’ve been focussing on two things - transience and archives (both the body as archive and archival documentation). I want to explore how documenting performance re-places the act of performing. Through the process of archiving, the performance has endless mobility that makes it emerging and transformative. In a way, it takes on a new life.

I’ve also been interested in how the act of moving as well as re-enacting performances becomes political. How many women have done these gestures before? How many will repeat them afterwards?

Personally, what has come up for me through the process is the importance of finding ways of paying homage to unspoken language. Specifically, finding ways of articulating oneself through the body when language ceases to be meaningful. I pay homage and respect to time, community, peripatetic, nomadic existence. Most importantly though, I wish to pay respect to transience and what it means to do something and acknowledging that it is going to fade away/change/evolve/be lost. Understanding that this is not where you’re going to be indefinitely.

Feedback on these works include:

  • Transduction

  • Catalysing

  • Dance as metaphor

  • Interplay - one is leading 

  • Interaction

  • Extrapolations of movements - seeing hints of the body

  • Is the work already existing? Who is authoring the work?

  • Analogue processes of replaying, re-videoing

  • Constellations

  • Talking about navigating these spaces, don’t determine what it is, it’s art

  • Corporeality of the body

  • Entanglement of the body - similar to other work in terms of entrapment, being tangled

  • Acting the sense of touch 

  • Dancing to the work - how can the work be re-acted, re-staged, shifted, changed again?

  • Dissolution - out of the body

  • Meditation of video

  • References to performance artists Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta

  • Atsuko Tanaka (artist), whose Electric Dress (1956) gestures toward postmodern body art. Tanaka’s Electric Dress is a phantasmal, ritualistic garment made from numerous glowing electric light bulbs, worn by the artist in her performance of the female Asian body.