Installation View
Recording from Performances
Duration: 01:01:33, 01:10:34, 01:11:43
Dimensions variable
2020
Recording from Performances
Tensions between interiority and exteriority run through the city environments of Eva Wang’s Futility. Across three single takes, the social and spatial rhythms of life unfold in real-time both in response to and independent of the artist – who, veiled entirely in white, performs a durational stasis amidst urban flux.
https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2021-exhibition/
Have you ever come across a moment when suddenly you lose the feeling of gravity and start to flow in an isolated space under a ray of sunlight? You are surrounded with air but you find it hard to breathe. You want to get hold of something to settle down to feel your weight. You make the effort with expectation. You grab one thing and it does not weigh you down, and you drop it. You grab another thing and it still does not make a difference, and you drop it again. You keep grabbing and keep dropping. Nothing works. The strength you spend only brings you more air you cannot breathe.
Lack of self-existence takes away the ability of holding attachments. There is no stable base to build anything on. Therefore, external social connections cannot be achieved while the effort of seeking and longing only adds the experience of entire passivity, ‘a mere object’.[1] Objectification of body is also an attempt of evidencing self-existence by being useful or needed by others, or becoming a part of the world, inspired by Méret Oppenheim’s performance, Das kannibalische Fest 1959. The status of physical presence and mental absence in the moment of the attempt is revealed by the cover of the white cloth, influenced by Man Ray’s L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse. The medium of performance instead of photography emphasizes the effort through the length of time, drawing on Leah Capaldi’s performance, InTo this.
It is simply a cyclical process of grabbing and dropping while flowing in the air one cannot breathe. The journey of trying to evidence self-existence tells how empty and absent oneself is in return. It does not provide an answer, a direction or an advice.
[1] Henry Plummer, The Experience of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016).
Eva Wang 