2020. LONG LIVE THE NEW FLE$H

Single channel video, 9:16 format, colour, 1 min 30 sec

2020. LONG LIVE THE NEW FLES$S$SH

 
Single channel video, 16:9 format, colour and sound (stereo), 4 min 30 sec 

As part of An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season - Proposals of Novel Ways of Being, National Gallery Singapore. Curated by Syaheedah Iskandar.



.TXT ︎︎︎

The video works expand the possibilities for imagining brownness, imaging it into a digital consciousness. The works draw on the artist’s personal history while borrowing elements from Sandro Botticelli’s depiction of The Three Graces in Primavera (c.1470–1480) and Nicolas Provost’s Long live the new flesh (2009) to offer a recourse for the lack of representation of non-western identities and to flesh out newer narratives between utopian and dystopian imaginings. Confronting the romanticisms in western enlightenment thought, the works reconfigure and magnify the presence of the generic, femme-presenting other through computer-generated imagery and data-moshing techniques, inquiring the grounds on would it mean for marginalised identities to traverse into the matrix.

The title is an adaptation of Nicolas Provost’s film Long live the new flesh (2009) in which data moshing techniques is utilised to render a newer visual experience to films. Using that as a catalyst as a way to fragment the visual language of racial, gendered trauma by breaking, morphing, fracturing and compressing frames as an infinite failure to perform in reading the body in the machine, which is then presented against a blue screen of death.

Image courtesy of National Gallery Singapore