RA:X Puncta aims to present a plurality of punctum moments (as defined by Roland Barthes) that disturb and prick at diasporic Asian narratives and slip beyond an easy legibility of “Asianness”.
︎︎︎Curated Group Exhibit
Year:
2022
Location: Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, Toronto ON
Partner Organization: Reel Asian International Film Festival
Curators: Jasmine Gui & keiko Hart
Creative Producer: Charisse Fung
Featured Artists: Jes Hanzelkova, Noor Khan, Vince Ha, Brannavy Jeyasundaram, Mo Phùng
Title of Work: I couldn’t see but it didn’t seem to matter anyways
The five works presented in this exhibition are honest yet uneasy, confrontational, and tender provocations that push in creatively personal ways, against and through the pressures and questions of their socio-political moments. Through our sustained attention, they may shake us up in particular and precious ways.
I couldn’t see but it didn’t seem to matter anyways because the busy street, the quiet alley, the dark space, the empty mall, the sky, the ground, the air, my breath was displaced regardless.
As a series of three images taken between two-years this work documents an ongoing project in mask making and performance art. Each image holds one version of the mask and captures the performances from the same perspective in different places. In this work, I am interested in masking as a way of both eluding and sitting-with the act of identification I undergo within the gaze of others as an East-Asian and feminine-presenting womxn. A push and pull between culture, place-memory, and constraint affects the ease of movement and the amount of face shown from image to image as the project progresses in time. In this way, these performances serve as a mirror where I perform my identity and all its ornamental and artificial derivatives. I focus on the ways which racialized and gendered identities have been forged out of the space between the biological, technological, and artificial. The space between the surface of the skin; the lens of the camera; a sleeve, an eye; the remixed and the glitching.
Final image by Mike Tjioe