IVAN CHENG
11 September, 2024
My practice is interested in making the audience conscious of the space between reading, interpreting, and synthesising. I am interested in the ambient and the implicit. My background as a performer and musician forms the basis for using performance as a critical medium, transposing tools to other spaces of interpretation. Alongside live situations, often structured formally like video shoots with witnesses, the practice is variously represented by films, installation and publications. The process of making the work is related to accumulation and caching of information – memory in human terms and machinic terms.
HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
Breaking free for me is a detaching from the past. This video is an annotated section of performance documentation*, in which the choreography of the performers and camera operator take a level of precedence over the live audience. Performance and its relation to repetition, consumption, and digestion. It fakes a second attempt at delivering a text around possession, and then annotates it simply with a supertext. The function of the edit as a way to split the idea of a sustained reality comes into play.
The manifesto frames the figurehead as bearing expectation to perform a transformation on the world. It is a relationship of messenger and recipient; so obviously there’s a flux in how a receiver can interpret and act on information. The manifesto made me want to represent a partiality of representation and the theatricality of subjectivity.
*Renovation (virginities 2), 2022, with Gailė Griciūtė, Alexander Iezzi, garments Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen), camera Camille D. Tonnerre. Curated by Céline Kopp, assistant curators Alexia Pierre, Noémie Pirus-Hassid. CNAC Magasin, Grenoble.
WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
I would develop further the format of staged and scripted mockumentary. I have long been thinking about musical buskers, who often rely on song recognition and technical prowess, to draw in a crowd, change the flow of traffic, occasionally rewarded in uneven amounts of cash—an economy that can avoid taxation. Within this, there is also a fascinating question around intellectual property and performance rights. Who does language belong to?
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SCREEN LOCATIONS
From 1–30 September 2024, each CIRCA PRIZE 2024 finalist will have their work appear consecutively throughout the month at 20:24 BST on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights, whilst also broadcasting across a global network of screens in Berlin and Milan.
LONDON
Watch the CIRCA PRIZE 2024 every evening from 1 – 30 September at 20:24 BST on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights screen.
BERLIN
Watch the CIRCA PRIZE 2024 every evening from 1 – 30 September at 20:24 CEST on the Berlin Limes Kurfürstendamm screen.
