Event Report: Annie Jael Kwan on A Stitch in Time? Situating David Medalla’s ‘Participation-Performance’ between British and Philippine Performance Art History

This report, commissioned by the Tate Research Centre: Asia, is a summary of a panel organised by Eva Bentcheva, independent art historian and curator, at Tate Modern on 21 November 2016. Entitled A Stitch in Time? Situating David Medalla’s ‘Participation-Production Performances’ between British and Philippine Performance Art History, this panel formed part of Contact Points: a seminar in which participants in the 2016 Tate Research Centre: Asia Visiting Fellowship Programme presented their research projects.

Art Asia Pacific: Brothers in Art

I first saw the Le Brothers’s large-scale three-channel video projection installation Into the Sea (2011) at the 2013 Singapore Biennale. The video featured the identical male twins in a series of beautifully filmed scenes set against the languid backdrop of the ocean. On one screen, the long-haired shirtless pair dig into the sand on a beach, and one buries the other in the sand.

A Collage of Constellations: “Now & Then…Here & There: Black Artists & Modernism”

From 6-8 October 2016, BAM in partnership with Iniva presented the Now & Then…Here & There: Black Artists and Modernism conference at Chelsea College, University of the Arts, London and Tate Britain, alongside BAM leader Sonia Boyce’s curated exhibition, Now! Now!…in More Than One Place. In this report commissioned by Iniva, I discuss the extremely rich programme, from which, the notion of “collage” and the imagining of “constellations” began to be mapped out in new, exciting ways.

Art Asia Pacific: Artist Provocateur

April in Paris—the air is still crisp in the late afternoon. People mill around the Trocadéro with its view of the Ei el Tower. A woman, wearing a floor-length red chador covered with sequins, shimmers with each step as she moves near an assembly protesting Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. At first the demonstrators do not notice her, but as she passes them, a few of them suddenly break away to approach her. They talk excitedly at her and take photos. She bows deeply.