PCAI supports Wu Tsang’s new work “One emerging from a point of view” (2019) that has been presented so far in the Sharjah Biennial 14 “Leaving the Echo Chamber”, in the 6th Onassis Fast Forward Festival in Athens and at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi in Venice on the occasion of Pinault Collection’s show “Luogo e Segni” at Punta della Dogana.
Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with the act of performance. In 2017 her video work “We hold were we study”, commisioned by PCAI and curator Nadja Argyropoulou, was presented in the Paratoxic Paradoxes group exhibition in the Benaki Museum, the first show of the PCAI Collection in Athens.
Wu Tsang’s artistic practice explores states of connectedness and in-betweenness. This fluidity often manifests as collaboration or is amplified in the merging of disciplines, such as performance, moving image, sculpture and installation. Her projects have been presented at cultural institutions, museums and film festivals all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art NYC, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Münster, Antenna Space Shanghai, MCA Chicago, MOCA and Hammer Museum Los Angeles and Berlinale Film Festival amongst others. Her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and “Ungovernables” New Museum Triennial, 2012 Gwangju Biennial, the 9th Berlin Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, and Performa 11 and she has received grants from Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow (Film/Video), a 2018 Hugo Boss Prize Nominee, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.
In One emerging from a point of view (2019), the artist continues an ongoing exploration of a ‘third’ space between two overlapping video projections, focusing on this overlap to create visual entanglement. As images cut and bleed into each other, two disparate narratives intertwine through synchronised camera choreography. Set three years ago on the northeastern shore of Lesbos, Greece, the work revolves around a scenario in which two women cross paths—although they never meet. One is a young woman from Morocco (Yassmine Flowers), who arrives in Athens after many months of travel through Turkey and Lesbos’ Moria camp. The other is a photojournalist (Eirini Vourloumis), who is assigned to document the ‘crisis’ and becomes personally involved with the fishing village of Skala Sikamineas, where locals have been first responders to the mass influx of refugees coming mostly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa.
Since 2011, more than half a million refugees have crossed into Europe through the Greek island of Lesbos, located in the Northern Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. Rather than attempt to document a ‘truth’, Tsang takes a magical realist approach as she works in collaboration with her subjects to create a hybrid fantasy. Drawing from history, mythology and science-fiction, her film situates the two parallel narratives within both real and imagined landscapes in order to tell the story of the island and the migration across interconnected and overlapping space and time.
One emerging from a point of view, 2019
Two-Channel Overlapping Projections, 5.1
Surround Sound
43 minutes
Co-commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation and Onassis Fast Forward Festival
Co-produced by Sharjah Art Foundation and Onassis Fast Forward Festival
With Generous Support from:
Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin
Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris
Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative
Singapore Art Museum for Singapore Biennale 2019
Image credits: Wu Tsang: One emerging from a point of view, 2019, © Photo: Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation
