Kiss or kill? Soul or form? Perhaps a gesture or a profile. The former ones refer to a sense of encounter, the latter to the account of autonomy. The two faces, while existing as parallel contexts on one side or the other, echo the theoretical substance of performativity.
Through balancing the heterogeneity of the act from each verb, they speak together. The concept of kiss or kill? The body needs a verb to rehearse within a biography is embedded in the intertextuality of body politics and biopolitics.
Following the crucial themes – death, power and the body – River Lin focuses on body politics. Lin’s work Mexician Kiss uses the body and site-specific installation to portray a ritual exercise articulated in an running sense of appearance and disappearance over time. Chang Wen Hsuan considers biopolitics as her key subject. Killing La Malinche departs from a common character found in different post-colonial histories. Here proposition illustrates the untranslatability of narratives under the imaginary historicity machines.
By countering the idea that if there is a first-person voice, there is a definition, both artists work-in-progress opens the question – If the first-person no longer exists then who owns the power of discourse?
Kiss may refer to a symbolic infinite and kill might speak for a zero degree. Or vice versa.
A Nocturnal Acted Salon with performative installations and happenings composed of narrative, editorial, and choreographic forms on Friday 27 October, 8pm (Exhibition: 28 Oct – 12 Nov by appointment)
Venue: Vernacular Institute (Av. Benjamin Franklin 50, Casa C, Escandón, Mexico City)
Mexician Kiss by River Lin & Killing La Malinche by Chang Wen Hsuan
River Lin (b.1984, based in Paris) practice includes site-specific performance, live art, theatre, dance, and installation. Lin takes cultural studies as a point of departure. The everyday and ritualistic of specific cultural contexts, the relationship between the body and spatial-temporal movements, and the bodily form between dance and performance art are the central concerns in Lin’s live art and curatorial practice. More
Chang Wen-Hsuan (b.1991, based in Taipei) is focused on performance through narrative and puppetry (animation) to explore the relationship between individual and historical narratives. She is concerned with how the individual inserts the self into various narrative structures; or conversely, the ways in which various narrative structures conceal personal voices, and how various historical writings determine individual lives. Her personal “storytelling” becomes an internally woven escape (liberation) route; fiction, because it s political. More
