FFF6 | One Emerging from a Point of View

Wu Tsang’s artistic practice explores states of connectedness and in-betweenness. This fluidity often manifests as collaboration or is amplified in the merging of disciplines, such as performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Reflecting her background in film, much of her work collapses boundaries between documentary and fiction as a way to continually question the relationship between sociality and its images.

In “One Emerging from a Point of View” (2019), the artist continues an ongoing exploration of a “third” space between two overlapping video projections, focusing on this overlap to create visual entanglement. As images cut and bleed into each other, two disparate narratives intertwine through synchronised camera choreography. Set on the northeastern shore of Lesbos, Greece, the work revolves around a scenario in which two women cross paths three years ago – although they never met. One is a young woman from Morocco (Yassmine Flowers), who arrives in Athens after many months of travel through Turkey and Lesbos’ Moria camp. The other is a photojournalist (Eirini Vourloumis), who is assigned to document the “crisis” and becomes personally involved with the fishing village of Skala Sikamineas, where locals have been first responders to the mass influx of refugees coming mostly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa.

Since 2011, more than 850,000 refugees have crossed into Europe through the Greek island of Lesbos, located in the Northern Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. Rather than attempt to document “truth,” Tsang takes a magical realist approach as she works in collaboration with her subjects to create a hybrid fantasy. Drawing from history, mythology, and science fiction, her film situates the two parallel narratives within both real and imagined landscapes in order to tell the story of the island and migration across interconnected and overlapping space and time.

Fast Forward Festival presents Tsang’s new film commission alongside the live performance “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune” by her ensemble group “Moved by the Motion” (co-founded by Tsang and the performance artist boychild). The two works in parallel show Tsang’s ongoing and collaborative investigation of movement, affect, and storytelling, exploring the potentiality of making “impossible” images in the face of real-life and representational crises.

As part of her video installation, Wu Tsang presents a series of photographs by Eirini Vourloumis – a photojournalist based in Athens who appears in Tsang’s film as one of its leads. This highly personal series is a continuation of Vourloumis’ photographic work documenting the refugee crisis on the island of Lesbos, where she first found herself in August 2015 as part of a mission.

This work in progress takes its title from the novel “The Mermaid Madonna” (1955) by Stratis Myrivilis, a renowned author from Lesbos. Here, the series is presented as part of an ongoing dialogue between the two artists on photographic and cinematic forms of representation, and more specifically on their shared dedication to magical realism as a means of disrupting the documentary genre.

(Text originally published for Sharjah Biennial 14, courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation.)