Wu Tsang at Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
A futuristic setting occupied by online avatars that holds the middle between documentary and fiction… Los Angeles based filmmaker, artist, and performer Wu Tsang has set up a multi-media installation for his solo show A Day in the Life of Bliss at Isabella Bortolozzi gallery in Berlin.
At the opening night the gallery hosted a performance by boychild, the Californian transgender performance artist who is well known for her haunted stage persona. This attracted such an enormous crowd that only about two-dozen people got to actually see the performance. It immediately turned into a myth. What is left for everyone to see is the performance setting: a room reminiscent of a nightclub with mirrored surfaces that are slightly dirty, reflecting the multi-coloured LED cables hanging body-like from the ceiling (His Master’s Voice, 2014).
The 20-minute docu-fantasy A Day in the Life of Bliss (2014, also the eponym of the exhibition), is a video installation, again featuring boychild who inhabits a near future world in which our virtual social media personas develop their own hive-minded consciousness. This is challenged by the celebrity figure BLIS, played by boychild.
Intentionally disorienting, the installation places viewers at the center, between two projection screens and two mirrored panels (one of which has a two-way mirror). Tsang’s video narrative is split into two channels. One examines the onstage persona of the performer. The other follows her out into a scary world: an urban jungle underlined by a heavy beat, that almost tears boychild’s representative body apart. Viewers can’t help but see themselves in the mirrors as well.
This video and mirror installation is the actual essence of the show. The back space is occupied by a group of photographs portraying androgynous figures, as well as Tsang’s protagonist boychild. They look like stills from a performance documentation. By being detached from the rest of the works in the show, they almost seem to be not strong enough to stand on their own.
The solo exhibition A Day in the Life of Bliss deals with the question of underground cultures and subcultures within a transnational and transsexual context. Tsang’s approach of exploring how social media and the Internet have affected identity and relationships, is reinforced by the way it is presented: slick, disorienting, slightly scary even. Heavily charged motifs, such as the mirrored image, serves as a clear-cut metaphor for the Internet as a mirror into our psyche, our desires, identities and gender.
Wu Tsang
A Day in the Life of Bliss
May 2 till July 31, 2014
Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie
Schöneberger Ufer 61
10785 Berlin
Melissa Canbaz
