Institute for Provocation warmly welcomes you to attend Shian Law’s performace this Sunday at 3:30PM.
Enter Solo / Group
This is a reflection that began with thinking about the nomadic Queer experience and its ways of escaping the prison house of the identitarian - a grand experiment that commits one’s trust to the uprooting from one mode of existence and proceeds to inhabit a new set of relations between subjects and places.
It is an abandonment of the common logic and orders of place that we know so well, and decidedly takes on an unthinking and raw process of experience, and an insistence to defer its narrative. It is to trust that the body intuits time and temporality without always being held captive by language.
To practice a nomadic Queer experience is not so much a movement in relation to geography but an attitude of self-excommunication through continuously unlearning oneself.
How can this exilic attitude form a mode of artistic research to counter the mis-en-scene of being in the world that is preset and contained by the dialectical binaries: art and culture, tradition and invention, the centre and the marginal, the global and the located cultures? To put the theory to practice, I would suggest that the work to ‘queery' knowledge operates from a nomadic thinking and ethics, which approximates ‘the conjunctions of simultaneously occupying a dual positionality of being spatially located in an inside and paradigmatically on the outside, or vice versa…the internal split that demands that we perceive of ourselves as both inside and outside of the field of activity and of its perception’[1] The solo is an emergent state of processing my brief bodily encounter with Peking Opera. It is at one hand a study of linguistics and the particular social world by the means of hierarchical learning and emplacement (master-t0-disciple, observation of authorities and strictures), and on the other in itself a queer-fieldwork to find ways to destabilise language. Group is a personal practice of queer kinship through performance-making.
[1] Irit Rogoff Circuits of Arts and Globalizations Time and location * This showing is made possible with the support of Institute for Provocation, Q-Space and Extantation.
Time, Location and Participants
Institute for Provocation
13 August 2017 3:30pm
Shian Law, Jialin, Jo, Maoyi and Vasha
About the artist Shian Law is a Malaysian-born Chinese Australian artist who works across the disciplines of choreography, live art and trans-media performance. Since receiving his Bachelor of Dance from the Victorian College of the Arts, he has worked as a performer, dancer, choreographer and dramaturg. Shian has worked closely with choreographer/mentor Jo Lloyd, Phillip Adams, Deanne Butterworth, Victoria Chiu, Melanie Lane, Mikala Dwyer, Brooke Amity Stamp, Lara Thoms and Liz Dunn. His commission portfolios include a number of national festivals and institutions, such as Dance Massive Festival, Sydney Dance Company, Next Wave Festival and National Gallery of Victoria. He received Tanja Liedtke Scholarship and Ian Potter Travel Grant to work in Berlin and New York, and international residencies at Cité International des Art as well as Ménagérie de Verre (Paris) supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, in addition to independent queer arts space Extantation (Chiangmai) and Q-Space (Beijing) through Asialink Residency. He is the inaugural artist-in-residence at The Temperance Hall under the stewardship of Phillip Adams’ Balletlab. Shian Law’s research in choreography and dance tends towards an analysis of artistic discourse and its situated-ness within historically and geographically located context. Via a social constructivist lens, he explores how dance and choreography operate to produce meaning that is contingent upon tensions between parochialism and the world at large; art and culture; aesthetics and politics. Historicity, genealogy and relationality provide central artistic prompts for inquiry in his body of work. He critically examines the identity of the artist as a contemporary construction, which is continuously challenged by the equilibrium between autonomy to define itself and subjection to socio-political forces. Shian is currently developing a new work, 'Peking Opera' charting a quasi-ethnographic route from Australia to Extantation (Chiangmai), Q-Space (Beijing) and other parts of Asia to narrativise the complex nomadic flow of Queer diaspora.