2024.07.07 Sunday 18:30
Location
Enbankment Building, 370 North Suzhou Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai
Artist: Xu Lishuang
Urgency Addiction is an experimental performance lecture. I will adhere to neuro-scientific guideline and suggestions circulated on the internet, allowing my body to become automated through repeated movements, enabling it to process three tasks simultaneously.
I will share stories within the ruin, telling while walking, walking while eating and working, working while exercising and filming, filming while speaking and coordinating the audiences.
The stories and movements are all tethered to “urgency” and its implicit driving force. In this performance-narration, “urgency” becomes more than a bodily expression, as it also alters the relationship between myself, the performer, and the audience. There is no narrative plot that needs to move forward in Urgency Addiction, only an exploration of how productivity disrupts the body, others, and the surrounding space.
Xu Lishuang is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and Changsha, with a degree from Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London.
Her artistic practice has been shaped by her experiences living in London, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Changsha, cities that have each left a unique imprint on her work during different phases. Xu Lishuang’s constant relocation has indirectly led her to explore themes of temporary space, bodily existence and alienation, and the dynamic relationship between humans and their environment. Her practice, which encompasses performance, video, and installation, is centered on embodied experience. She uses her body to intervene in and deconstruct spaces, challenging the original functions of objects within them. By provoking viewers to question their preconceived notions, she reveals the intricate entanglement between subjective perception and objective reality.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
