Dakota Guo (DAI, 2022) is grateful for having contributed to Savvy Contemporary's recent project "How Will You Ascertain Time?" (April 30 - May 27, 2022) with her performance installation "I snuggle into the tomb bed from my wedding chamber my hair is the quilt the spirit-guiding streamer". Dakota's installation and her performance at the opening initiates a dialogue across disjointed realms with the corpse bride in ghost marriage tradition, disrupting a certain necrotechnic—namely, the Chinese entombment that establishes the paralleled order of the realm of the living and the realm of the undead. While the physical actants of corpses and spirit articles are transposed into a virtual realm—which, paradoxically, is also built brick-by-brick with tangible materials—and become effective as virtuality, their hauntology is testified as their carnal forms vanish in themselves.
"How Will You Ascertain Time?" reflects on the ongoing discourse on waiting by taking Shahram Khosravi's work as a point of departure and by setting the foundations of this project on the reading of time through the lens of waiting. “Waiting” here is understood as a non-linear experience of time where the realm itself has no beginning or an end. It is a condition that lies on the periphery of capital and colonial time, imposed and protracted as a mechanism to exercise authority, where time is a construct and value established by the empire meant to be followed by its subjects. Hence, waiting becomes a political condition that deeply impacts psychologically and is felt emotionally and physically by those who become inevitable victims of this realm, and like other political conditions is experienced differently by each body, relative privilege of class and race, and geography.
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WITH
Lamia Abukhadra,
Maria Thereza Alves,
Tewa Barnosa,
Ariel Bustamante,
Rehema Chachage,
Lamin Fofana,
Dakota Guo,
Euridice Zaituna Kala,
Zahra Malkani,
Nida Mehboob,
Mehregan Meysami,
Naeem Mohaiemen,
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese,
Igor Vidor
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CONCEPT & CURATION Hajra Haider Karrar
ARTISTIC DIRECTION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio
CO-CURATION Sagal Farah
CURATORIAL ASSISTANCE Lili Somogyi, António Pedro Mendes
MANAGEMENT Onur Çimen, Lia Milanesio, Lema Sikod
PRODUCTION Rafał Łazar, Santiago Doljanin, António Pedro Mendes, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Onur Çimen,
Waylon D'Mello, Lili Somogyi, Hubert Gromny
SOUND DESIGN Rey KM Domurat
LIGHT DESIGN Emilio Cordero
TECH Bert Günther
COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger
DESIGN Juan Pablo García Sossa
HANDOUT Nancy Naser Al Deen
INTERNSHIP Hubert Gromny (DAI,2021)
(For more information on the exhibition see https://www.savvy-contemporary.com/en/projects/2022/how-will-you-ascertain-time/)