"A dynamic first effort by Buwan Art Collective, the current showcase mediates the notion of otherness, addressing difference through the individual and everyday performative gestures. The featured works by the four young practitioners are bold – tackling the delicate issue of race and destigmatising the abjection of menstrual blood, and quietly introspective – manifested by the mundane and alienation of the self. Their resolution and ingenuity to present these performative works online is timely, expanding new ways and approaches of understanding the medium of performance." - Kimberly Shen, Curator and Arts Educator
THE ARCHIVE OF
Buwan Performance Project
otherness
THUMBNAILS OF WORKS ONLY SHOWN
An Online Exhibition Live from Saturday, 27th June 2020 to Wednesday, 22nd July 2020
Buwan Performance Project consists of a monthly series of inter/multidisciplinary performances from varying young artists. In regards to the collective name, Buwan means month and moon in Filipino and it symbolises time, energy, change and rhythm. This month's theme is Otherness, acknowledging the quality and fact of being different. This idea of otherness is central to sociological analysis of how majority and minority identities are constructed. As the representation of various different groups within any given society is controlled by the groups that have greater political power.
How to make generic curry 101
by Subashri Sankarasubramanian
Screen capture of How to make generic curry 101
2020
Performance for Video
This performance work titled How to make a generic curry 101 is a satire, drawing on the various experiences of racism faced by the artist in a foreign country. It uses the highly caricaturised personas of local TV presenters and actors, as a method of “performing”. Inspired by the “Animal Farm”, this artwork uses food and a recipe as a means of mockery, as a means of making the audience confront their bafflingly oblivious questions and statements including, “I passed by a group of Indians and I started smelling like them and had to shower to get rid of the smell.”
Throughout the video, the artist tries to cook a non-existent “curry”, drawing parallels to her attempts to explain why certain statements are racist, and failing to make an impression. The name also brings forward the ignorance of using “curry” as a blanket term, which erases the vast history of food and its origins.
0.8s Dialogue
by Arrvinraj Balasubramaniam
1 of 8 images from 0.8 Dialogue
2020
Text embedded Motion Images
Arrvinraj uses long exposure photography as a medium to re-introspect the alienated part of the self within self-consciousness. This alienated part is that which experiences the world first-hand, subsequently overshadowed by the Super-ego. This inner conversation takes place in certain formlessness, manifesting as dialogue, sound, melody, fragments of memories or even smell. When the self-consciousness overwrites those, it will only remain deep in our ego. Serving as maps of personal momentary experience, the work aims to express the artist's doubts on the self as a defined object.
Blood of Life 3.0
by Sophia Dominguez
Screen capture from Blood of Life 3.0
2020
Performance for Video
The Blood of Life series is a performative act of cleansing, the menstruating female body with a milk bath. The artist used the medium of her own menstrual blood as the message to destigmatise the object and subject of women, to unpack the gender inequality and injustices that women receive for something that is considered her norm cycle. Menstrual blood has been viewed as dirty blood in many societies, and this has led to invalidating and she-blaming females for their emotions and weaknesses, and this has led to inequality, abusive treatments and loss of empathy. The nature of the menstrual needs an urgent paradigm shift – to rethink, relook and refeel the parameters of myths, public healthcare, and social injustices surrounding them. This body is no less deserving than your mother’s, your female-bodied partner’s or female strangers’.
Walking with time
by Laura Pelea
1 of 10 Photographs from Walking With Time
2020
Performance for Photography
Walking with time is a performative work that is based on energy and momentum. Using the weather as a symbolism for a grey day at the park where the artist was strolling around, she took the chance to dance and splash in a puddle – when nobody else was doing. The driving force of othering herself from the others in an environment she found mundane was just as pointless as the atmosphere and every moment happening.