Floating & Resounding (with Kolatt)
Performance video loop, 11 min 35 sec, 720 x 404 mov, 2013. Collaboration with Myanmar performance artist Kolatt.
Premiered May 6, 2013, at ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland.
The left channel of the video was made in 2010, Bago, Myanmar, with new generation artists from New Zero Art Space. The venue of the performance had to be moved from the city of Yangon to the countryside in Bago because the authorities won’t give permission to present it in a public space. It is about people living under control.
Background facts: the art scene in Burma is under censorship. All exhibitions must be reviewed and permitted by a government censorboard. All artworks with political, sexual and religious aspects are prohibited to exhibit. The left part of the video reflects to this situation with the artist in the role of the authorities, the state, the country itself. The citizens are represented as dolls.
The second part of the video is made in 2013 in Basel, Switzerland. We can see the artist looking at the former video on a screen in a meditative state, humming the National Anthem of Burma on repeat.
The two channels symbolise the relation of East and West, with the East’s continuing issues of oppression and human rights, and the West’s tendencies of voyeuristic observation, its distanced commentary and its lack of intervention.