Page 212 - Contemporary Art and Old Masters

TONG WENMIN
LONG AGO - PSA

Tong Wenmin “grafted” Shanghai’s endemic plants
into the bodies of the performers - different plants are
allocated to different performers based on the postures
and characteristics of each performer - and built a “forest”
at the Power Station of Art Shanghai(PSA). The muscles
#SHANGHAIBIENNALE #BODIESOFWATER tired from staying in the same position for a long time,
accompanied by the slight ups and downs of an individual’s
Itziar Okariz and her daughter, Ocean Breath. Online performance. Phase 1: breathing. The relationship between a tree and a forest, and
*A* Wet-Run Rehearsal, 13th Shanghai Biennale. Courtesy of the artists and human beings and the environment are re-examined here.
Power Station of Art.

ASTRIDA NEIMANIS AND CLARE BRITTON
THE RIVER ENDS AS THE OCEAN

As bodies of water, we are all flowing through one
another - leaking, sponging, dripping, seeping. But as
bodies of water we are also always becoming something
else -unstating and dissolving our watery selves, to
feed the liquid hunger of new lively desires. While the
source of a river often captures a common imaginary,
this time we turn our attention to a river’s termination
in and as the ocean. The performance lecture entwines
the voices of Astrida Neimanis and Clare Britton to offer
SPECIAL PROJECTS
watery meditations on endings, particularly in the current
context of multispecies extinction, over a million human
ITZIAR OKARIZ
lives lost to a global pandemic, and the seeming end to
OCEAN BREATH
various ways of life, and living. A first-person, site-based
This work is performed by Itziar Okariz along with her
account attentively follows a small urban river from its
daughter. Through their delicate and undulating breathing
inauspicious emergence in a golf course storm drain,
pattern, the performance conjures up images of a
to its emptying out into the maw of the Pacific. We can
prehistoric oceanic living space, and in doing so, evokes a
never know for sure what follows an ending. Will another
rich imagination of the very beginning forms of life on earth.
body be there waiting, to gather these waters and
welcome the tide in?
DAVID SOIN TAPPESER AND HIMALI SINGH SOIN A view from Shanghai Biennale, courtesy of Shanghai Biennale
IN THE SPIRIT OF THE FOUNTAIN:
A PERFORMANCE AT POMPEII

The project draws on research into the artist Himali’s
namesake, the Himalayas, and its animistic rituals and
remedies, sacred geometries, old new materialism and
spirit realism.The artist carries the Nagada drums along
a seismic line, from a nuclear mountain in the Himalayas
across the world to the volcanic remnants of Pompeii. On
the way, they accumulate the tremors and mythologies of
the lands they encounter. They receive the rhythms of the
oceans and particles of promise in the air while retrieve a
collective life-force on the way.

212 WORLD of ART