ART CITIES:Copenhagen-Wu Tsang
Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary in works that explore hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. Tsang re-imagines racialized, gendered representations beyond the visible frame to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Copenhagen Contemporary Archive
Wu Tsan in her solo exhibition “Diversity is Reality” at Copenhagen Contemporary presents two important works “Into A Space Of Love” (2018) and “Shape of a Right Statement” (2008). The two films, made roughly ten years apart, mark two moments in Tsang’s career as a performer and filmmaker and address vital aspects of her work, including the politics of visibility and appropriation – who speaks for whom; the ephemerality of community; and performance as modes of resistance. “Shape of a Right Statement” (2008) is a short video manifesto. Staring directly at the camera, Tsang re-performs one section of “In My Language,” a forceful YouTube manifesto by autism rights activist Amanda Baggs. Tsang’s powerful interpretation was staged at the Silver Platter, home to the club Wildness, following a year in which the artist had presented live performances of the Baggs text. Tsang mimetically reproduces the voice of Baggs’s Speech Generation Device, stating, “It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication.” Language, particularly its transmission and translation, plays a crucial role in Tsang’s work as a structure to be dismantled through alternative modes of communicability. These aspects are also crucial to “Into A Space O f Love” (2018), an essay-film exploring the intergenerational legacy and the spirit of house music, rooted in New York’s underground culture. The film examines how house music, like so many other movements, was created by communities of queer, brown, and black people and then appropriated by mainstream white cultures. “We own it, we possess it, and we give it away freely”. says Shaun J. Wright, one of the protagonists. By emphasizing how the genre of house music was born in the 1970s in inner cities like NYC, where “diversity is a reality” as Venus X, one of the protagonists of the film says and the young generations have to deal with cosmic traumas and a hybrid past, Tsang shows the life provided by the club, its music, its participants, and alternative kinship structures. Like a church, the club is portrayed as a ‘space of love’, a spiritual environment in which its creators challenge the world with the power of music.
Info: Curator: Irene Campolmi, Copenhagen Contemporary, Refshalevej 173A, Copenhagen, Duration: 20/6-11/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, https://copenhagencontemporary.org
