– a performance-lecture, 9/07/2019, grunt gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Taking to street often gives me a mixed feeling of déjà vu. The immersive and overwhelming sense of togetherness, empowerment as well as precariousness of protests is haunting me from time to time, through embodied participation, documentation, remembering and re-enacting the act of resistance from generations to generations. How are we rehearsing the past for the future? How is the future re-enacting the past? In my performance-lecture, I depart from my doctoral thesis on Umbrella Movement (2014) in Hong Kong, and seek to explore the challenges of representing performative action and transferring our memories and knowledge in a resilient manner.
The performance lecture embodies a mixture of video footage from the 2014 civil unrest and the 2019 on-going one in Hong Kong, plus chanting of protest slogans (in Cantonese) and reading of auto-ethnographic text of 2012 and 2014 demonstrations (in English). The time-space misplacement of text, body movement and audio-visual footage, together with language differences raise questions about the representation of in-situ protests and its precariousness, as well as the vulnerability involved.
How do we understand performance art through secondary documentation? What are the limits of the archive in communicating the power of protest or an act of resistance expressed through art? Hong Kong based artist and researcher wen yau presented a performance-lecture exploring the challenges of representing performative action in an archival setting. Looking to the transmission of knowledge and culture through the performing body, articulated as *The Repertoire* by scholar Diana Taylor, wen yau draws on her own experience at the intersection of arts and activism during and following the 2014 Occupy Central protests also known as the Umbrella Movement. wen yau’s auto-ethnographic research into ongoing political and cultural struggles in Hong Kong questions how we remember/re-enact gestures of solidarity from past and present generations of artists and dissidents. grunt was excited to share wen yau’s first-hand experience with the massive anti-extradition law demonstrations that have swept Hong Kong over the this year.
The performance-lecture was concluded by a discussion with Dan Pon, Archives Manager of grunt gallery, on documenting and archiving performative practices in art and activism.
This work is a sequel of another performance-lecture titled This is NOT a Performance; This is NOT an Ethnography presented at the symposium Archives of the Ephemeral. Thinking, Practicing, Interconnecting – A Debate on the Accessibility of Performance Art in Switzerland.
>> grunt’s programme documentation and response work by S F Ho and Jane Shi
photos by Jamie Loh; courtesy of grunt gallery
This performance-lecture was part of the Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2018/19 programme “Representing the Ephemeral”
presented by grunt gallery, Vancouver, Canada.