Jumping Frames: Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival

中文

Jumping Frames: Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival
Project Eaton HK, Hong Kong

Date: 09.12, 2023 - 10.06, 2023

Artists: Melati SURYODARMO 麦拉蒂·苏若道默 |

Melati Suryodarmo's "Unpacked No. 1: Love" presented as part of the Expanded Space: (RE)PLAY programme during Jumping Frames: Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival

A conversation between space, body, and the moving image, spiralling on an endless journey. For over two decades, ‘Jumping Frames’ has championed the diverse possibilities of what performance can be on screen. Coming this September, the Festival will once again showcase an eclectic range of creations and experiments through screenings and expanded presentations to explore the traces of dance, life, and the environment.

Melati Suryodarmo presents UNPACKED No.1: Love, one of her performance lecture series that delve into a poetic exploration of personal experiences and reflections. This lecture is brought to life through a series of actions and provocations, gradually unfolding the narrative.

She reveals objects, relics, and fragments that are directly linked to her past performances. Suryodarmo considers objects as significant tools for examining and scrutinising different aspects of our existence. She believes that objects bear witness to the people who live with them, and they hold the power to convey meaning, history and emotion.

Suryodarmo performs and interacts with these objects in a different time and context, their original meanings and intentions become displaced. This displacement alludes to the transient nature of our lives as we arrive, depart, move, and shift through the world.

UNPACKED No.1: Love serves as a platform for Suryodarmo to re-contextualise and reinterpret her previous works, infusing them with new layers of understanding and significance. She selected some documentations, objects and references which influenced her works, among them Love Me Tender (2001), Deformed Ethic of a Relationship 1.0 and Deformed Ethic of a Relationship 2.0 (2005), The Komodo Files (2005), Height of Limerence (2007) and Lullaby for the Ancestors (2001).

Love, notes Suryodarmo, uncovers the most existential conditions of being human. In Unpacked No. 1: Love, she employs the clichés and kitsch qualities of love, in a narration of love in all its joy and radiance, compounded by its inexplicable despair, alienation, self-effacement and denial.

As the performance lectures progress, the gallery space itself undergoes a transformation. The presence of these objects and its incorporation into the artist’s storytelling allows the space to evolve and become an integral part of the overall experience. It serves as a canvas for the exploration of themes such as love, delusion, tragedy, and the complexities of the human condition.

Through this reconciliation of various perspectives, the artist invites the audience to engage with their own interpretations and reflections. The immersive nature of the performance lectures, coupled with the personal and intimate nature of the displayed objects, creates a profound connection between the artist, the artwork, and the viewers.

The performative-objects represent poetic actions – spontaneous and abstract – as Suryodarmo imitates, much like the vibrant forms of a Wassily Kandinsky painting. In weaving her past performances, these objects function as personal anecdotes, inhabiting and punctuating the gallery space as the lectures unfold, prompting profound and visceral encounters to Suryodarmo’s artistic oeuvre and somatic practice.