Fluid
Cosmologies
Details
A series curated by Samy Bie and Anastasia Chugunova as part of the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths College.
1 August 2023, 7-9 pm
River Cao – I Found a Dead Bird
With sound by Nanzhen Yang
31 August 2023 7-9 pm
Bea Xu – Pericardium ᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ
Nanzhen Yang (in collaboration with Harry Appleyard and Nuka Nayu)
Free Entry
A suggested donation of £5 will support the programming and artist fees.
RSVP
Access Information
FormaHQ and Presse Books are located on the ground floor with a wheelchair-accessible toilet available. Peveril Gardens is located on the rooftop with a lift available to arrange by emailing info@forma.org.uk or speaking to a team member.
Fluid Cosmologies
A series curated by Samy Bie and Anastasia Chugunova
1 + 31 August 2023, 7-9 pm
Please join us for a two-part sonic event coinciding with two full moon days in August and featuring performances by River Cao, Bea Xu and Nanzhen Yang (in collaboration with Harry Appleyard and Nuka Nayu). Taking this celestial event that happens every two or three years as a point of departure, the programme brings together the artists whose practice arises from the navigation into Asian diasporic and queer experiences. By weaving in their practice fictional narratives, the artists thus redefine the very notion of ritual and aim to explore its potential to heal and bring together the communities to come.
1 August 2023, 7-9pm
River Cao – I Found a Dead Bird
With sound by Nanzhen Yang
31 August 2023, 7-9pm
Bea Xu – Pericardium ᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ
Nanzhen Yang (in collaboration with Harry Appleyard and Nuka Nayu)
About the Series
On the Full Sturgeon Supermoon on the 1st of August, Tuesday, the programme will kick off with a performance by River Cao. Taking its source from a mourning ceremony, River’s performance ‘I Found a Dead Bird’ acts as the artist’s melancholic reflection on the resurrection of marginalized queer identities in the waters of southern China. Led by the flute and bells, the viewers are invited to follow a journey that opens connections between mourners, spectres, and landscapes. To attune the viewers to the spirit of River’s performance and introduce the audience to our second event, Nanzhen Yang will not only present an audio-visual live performance at the second event on the 31st of August but also will be the guest artist on the 1st. To support the artist River Cao, Nanzhen will do two separate sound performances before and after I Found a Dead Bird. The first one of them will serve as a pre-link to River's performance, and the last one as an experimental soundscape that will close the night.
The evening of the 31st of August, Thursday, marked by the appearance of a Full Blue Supermoon, will start with the CGI-based A / V live performance by Nanzhen Yang, made in collaboration with Harry Appleyard and Nuka Nayu. Dwelling on animism and machinery, urbanization and traditional beliefs intertwined in the present, the artists propose to imagine a sacred shelter existing beyond the boundaries of time and space.
It will be later followed by Pericardium ᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ, a performance by Bea Xu drawing on the traditional Chinese organ body clock. Built upon the concept of the cyclical ebb and flow of energy throughout the body, the system thus shows which meridians and their associated organs and emotions are most energetically active at specific times of the day. As an act of a temporal reclamation, the performance extends from the Greenwich Meridian Line and magnifies a glitch in colonial time. Following Triple Burner ᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ at Milan Art Week (2022) and Kidney ᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ at Luna Festival (2023), the ritual at FormaHQ will take place when the qi energy is the most active in Pericardium meridian. An emergent spark of dark-fire formlessness, the time ritual spirals out of a screening of the original intervention, up to Peveril Gardens to connect with all attendant co-rituals, before spiralling back down into the lower heart of the building to end.
Artist Profiles
River Cao is a moving image and performance artist based in London. River's works arise from a mourning approach, rebuilding the landscape from his early memories and discovering the perspective of revenant are the process of mourning in his practice. River is interested in how lamentation as a translation strategy interprets the fluidity of the subject.
River's recent work draws from the performative nature of mourning in regional Chinese culture and queerness. He has always been trying to find a way to relieve his inner sense of loss, which is rooted in a desire for tranquillity and fantasy. A nightfall in a small town by the river in southern China has always been an attractive picture in his mind. River's videos and performances aim to explore personal memories, identity, and revenants. He attempts to reveal a reimagined melancholy by employing a silent narrative and untouched landscapes in response to the question of whether mourning can be a positive work. Using mourning as a method, River aims to create self-actualised spaces to enable the audience to rethink grief and queerness.
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Bea Xu is a Chinese-British psychic worker experimenting with reality production. Using collaborative play, speculative fiction and therapeutic intervention, they design and means-test integral, post-Anthropocene cosmologies with live participants and fellow accomplices. Often foregrounding blood magic, decolonized time and non-binary logic with an EcoGothic focus, their work engages with archetypal shadow and is informed by their training as an integrative, transpersonal psychotherapist.
A studio resident at London’s HQI, Bea is a member of oiioiooi collective and completed the 9th Alternative Education Programme at Rupert, Vilnius. They are the creatrix of ritual laboratory LUNARCHY 2.0 and have collaborated with Furtherfield Gallery, Omsk Social Club and Ittah Yodah – with work selected for Solo Show, Plague Space, Arts of the Working Class, amongst others, and shows in Prague, Oslo, Seyðisfjörður, Berlin, NYC and Milan.
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Nanzhen Yang is a multiple-disciplinary artist and DJ based in London. In her practice, she weaves sound, videos, CGI and A/V work, thus going beyond the limits of specific media. In her sound practice, she aims to bring together the cinematic and the emotional and skip past genre boundaries to create her own sonic, narrative-led adventure. Combined with her Fine Art Graduate background, she makes full use of her animism-based mind in her music journey. Recently, Nanzhen has performed at Iklektik ArtLab, London, UK (2023), FOLD, London, UK (2023), Reference Point, London, UK (2023), and ICA, London, UK (2022).
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Nuka Nayu and Harry Appleyard are multidisciplinary artists specialising in textile, costume, digital work, performance and moving image. Their work focuses on fictioning the materiality and mythology of chaos and craft to confront things that lie on the border of depiction. Taking inspiration from spectral folklore and its temporal projections that emerge unexpectedly, they investigate contingency through stories, characters, improvisations, diagrams, floorplans, footage, scans, marks found on objects, and collected notes. Their practice can be described as a way of invoking the absent and invisible; in hauntological fragments.
Nayu grew up in Korea and graduated from the Royal College of Art with MA in Sculpture. Harry is a recent graduate studying BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. They have been working together since 2020 and have released the film Book of Permutation = Tale of a Dying House for BAGRI Foundation, Chang/ce commission in 2021 which was selected for Queer East Film Festival 2022 and shown at Barbican Centre, CCA Glasgow, and HOME Manchester. The duo have also shown their work in various group shows such as Peach Fuzz at The Factory Project (curated by Haze Projects), New Art World at Guts Gallery and Space Lapse at the Royal Society of Sculptors.
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Images:
River Cao, ‘I Found A Dead Bird’. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2023.
River Cao, ‘I Found A Dead Bird’ (2022). Video still.
Bea Xu, ‘Triple Burner ᵛᵒʳᵗᵉˣ‘ (2023). Performance View at Milan Art Week, 2023. Photo: Tiziano Ercoli & Ivanna Sfredda.
Nanzhen Yang, Performance at Iklektik Artlab, 2022. Photo: Matt Favero.
Nuka Nayu and Harry Appleyard, video still from ‘Incarnation Under Hot Earth’, 2023.