MY Husbands and I Need A Space to Lie

photo by Golboo Amani

 39 hours at  Concourse Gallery from May 6-20, 2011

I fill a wall space with text: MY HUSBANDS AND I NEED A SPACE TO LIE. I stand in front of the wall, holding a paper: LOOKING FOR A BED. There is a hat with a THANKS sign on the floor. When audience walks in front of me, I shout at them as loud as  I can with very firm and angry tone: HEY! CAN I HAVE SOME CHANGE?

It is a protest performance addressing the fact that I was unable to show my installation work, The Husbands and I, at Emily Carr 2011 Graduate Show. I proposed my work to Graduate Committee in January, 2011 with very detailed descriptions about the work dimension and plan, which involves photos, a plasma TV, and a bed. On May3, 2011, the Graduate Committee came to see my work and said there was no space to show this piece. Later, the committee assigned me a place where it is impossible to install the photos and TV due to technique requirements. As a result, I decided not show the original work but this protest performance.

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[Absence|Presence]

photo by Phoebe Jin and Dennis Rosenfeld, Video by James Zhang

I FEEL HOMELESS IN YOUR PRESENCE

I WILL BE AT HOME IN YOUR ABSENCE

On the CODElive opening during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, I started to push a 12′x 8′x 42″gallery wall along streets of Granville Island. This movable wall is painted in white with 4 hidden wheels. On the wall, printed so as to be unremarkable except by flash photography, is the title of an exhibition: “I feel homeless in your presence/I will be at home in your absence”

This performance is a response to the BC government’s funding cuts to the arts. As a result of massive funding cuts, many galleries have been forced to close, and art is losing its home in B.C. The gallery wall, once a space of opportunity for artists, has had to be moved outside. This performance represents this sense of loss.

This hardship not only results in a tremendous loss to the arts in BC arts, but also raises more questions for artists. Can art survive without walls? Do we artists really need a gallery? The wall sometimes does not facilitate art but acts as an obstacle to divide art and artists. What if we artists try to push the gallery wall to the outside voluntarily, rather than being forced to move out because of politics? What if we artists try to move this obstacle in order to create more space for ourselves, rather than restricting ourselves within its boundaries? No matter whether the wall is forced outside or whether it needs to be pushed by artists ourselves, the performance presents this opposition, confrontation and struggle.

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