I suddenly thought about this particular piece of work this artist group (I think from Taiwan) I found during my MCP research, they had been in the taipei biennial list I think, and that's how I found out about them. Then I discovered this project called Charting the Contours of Time - "inspired by the archive images of an event designed for blind children at Sunderland Museum in 1912, which was an invitation for them to feel the museum collection through the sense of touch."
"Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel (2009-Now) was founded by Val Lee and Hikky Chen, whose works create constructed ephemeral situations where the audience enters a poetic constellation of action script, installation, sound, hypnotic rhetoric, composite structure, mise-en- scène, and space. Their works currently focus on urban violence, political turmoil, body memories of the unusual state, abstruse historical reenactment, and the diversified modes of psychological absorption and participation for public audiences. Through the continuous collaborations of friends from visual arts, performing arts, experimental music, and activism, their interdisciplinary yet site- responsive works form some dialogue and resistance in a dream."
I was curious about the archive images and I found this fickr folder (there were no other sources) full of images from the event, or series of events. and they were really intriguing. It's great to see that back in the day they had such freedom to have events involving the touching of the collection, and I'm happy thinking about how excited the children were to have this opportunity. But just on the surface, visually, those photographs present a strange still image of someone supposedly in motion, in the probably slow motion they were feeling these objects, and of course this brings about ideas of what nature is to these children and how they can learn that through a museum's collection and how real that is. What I found really impressive is the sculptures they made just from the memory of touch... I'm definitely going to use these images in collage somehow.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/twm_news/albums/72157626903151525/with/5862889133/
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| " 1913, Models made by the blind children on visits to Sunderland Museum, in which they were allowed to touch the exhibits. The models were made 5 weeks later and made at Sunderland Council Blind School " |
http://www.gmgscollective.com/cct
below is a description of the project:
"Charting the Contours of Time is inspired by the archive images of an event designed for blind children at Sunderland Museum in 1912, which was an invitation for them to feel the museum collection through the sense of touch. The participants explored rare objects and artefacts, such as indigenous canoe, human skull, porcelain, giant animal, cobra and polar bear specimens, to construct an individual ‘view’ of the world. This work aims to investigate the authenticity of live art performance. Encircled by six pillars in Warehouse 14 of the Chung Hsing Paper Mill, performers repeatedly scrub a three-meter long, man-made marine animal, carrying out their actions in complete darkness. As audiences enter the constructed situation, they need to watch the performance with night-vision goggles. Apart from one albino performer with amblyopia, other performers include a female twin, a male and the creator of Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel (GMGS).Collectively, they perform the scrubbing of a dead walrus. Throughout the performance, they do not interact with the audience, and only perform their futile labor in pitch-black darkness. The narrow raster image produced by the night-vision goggles partially hinders the audience’s vision, and in a way, makes their viewing more focused. The confined vision underscores the difficulty in viewing. When performers are deprived of the conditions for immediate visual feedback and become unaware of the expressions and their own actions and those of their fellow performers, can such status push for an even more chaotic and boundless performing? Additionally, through low-tech visual devices, the participants can telescope time, and interpenetrate the black circumambient universe and unknown historical event.
GMGS has been developing co-opetitive techniques to engage the audience, using rhythm, sound, instruction and implication to guide, drive or resist the energies and relations between performers and the audience. Through experimenting with continuously changing perspectives, the aim is to place the audience within an expansive yet fixed lens to closely or remotely observe the actions of performers and direct the entire performance. The audience is usually the unit based on which the actions are carried out, witnessing a high-energy spectacle in the performance rather than just being viewers. This work continues the concept of “non-realistic historical reenactment” employed in White Terror, White Horror, White Thriller and The Black Waves, and simulates a museum event attended by a nameless crowd a century ago. Echoing the concept of time that “every second is already in the past,” the work adopts an internal model of building the smallest “event stream.
Carefully following a set of formulated rules, the work adopts the form of performative group sculpture and resembles a combination of objects that allows endless deconstruction, arrangement, reduction and representation. The performance symbolizes an entirety that can break in the history of time and permit entry. Like viewing sculptures or paintings, it exists as the smallest unit. Using body, it constructs a document of a nameless crowd. In the history of sculpture, after the peak of religious sculpture passed and group sculpture appeared, motifs like martyr citizens and nameless people emerged. In the work, the boundless dark site is reminiscent of the “negative space” in sculpture, emphasizing the re-emerging body. As usual, GMGS utilizes both the audience and performers to construct collective memories of the body, reproducing the lost body through live art. Contrasting to the albino performer with impaired vision, the seeing performers cross a blind visual threshold. As the former gains visual advantage, the previously advantageous body of the latter becomes a vehicle of history and the other. Through the work, the audience enter a heterogeneous temporality comprised of performance, imaging device and sound, shaping their individual visual narrative that might be fluid, splitting, digressing, overlapping or sometimes failing.
Through low-resolution, flickering and occasionally dysfunctional imaging, the body of the audience embodies the extended cinema after meaning becomes extended. Moreover, the extensive, controlled situation that reminds of an immersive dark chamber constructed for the observers is deconstructed again via a 360-degree infrared ray surveillance recording system and the short-distance closed-circuit video recording. A cameraperson uses a 4D vector controller to adjust the focus length and aperture and videotapes the non-stop image feeds from the surveillance system originally existing in the paper mill, minutely recording the observers’ routes in the space. As a result, the observers that are reenacting the historical event become a new, unnamed document of the event.
Time and body dilate in the dark.
And we are all fictional."
I will post some screenshots from the performance in the next post*.