Скачать или смотреть Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen | Expanded Cinema Performance: Taro, Taro (2023, Oldham Theatre)

Taro, Taro | Performed Film #03 | Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen
Source, Oldham Theatre, Singapore, 2023-11-04
THE UNENDING ISLAND PROJECT

Taro, Taro is a site-specific expanded cinema performance by Lam Li Shuen and Mark Chua, exploring the materiality of the taro root with modified 16mm projections, together with prepared and improvisational sound.

Using taro harvested at Oldham Theater and the National Archives, the taro skin, starch and flesh, were adhered and used to stain the 16mm film loops live during the performance. Image-transferred prints of taro flesh textures were also incorporated on one of the film loops. Borne from sound and image as a singular action, it is a live experimental film experience.
The images were paired with an improvisational soundscape, utilizing the projector’s reading of the taro components and prints on the film’s optical soundtrack. Thinking in this way, of the image-making device as itself a part of the sonic instrumentation – a soundscape formed around their interweaving rhythm.

The performance is inspired by the historical and spiritual traces of the taro as an ancient crop in early Southeast Asian history. A thinking on its connections to maritime Southeast Asia, the borderlessness of the region, the islands and rivers, as well as migratory and agricultural flow. In bringing forth intimately textural impressions of the taro, the performance seeks to cast our eyes to buried layers beneath our soil. A physical reanimation of the clashing and converging lines of flow, in place, identity and history.

Artist bio:

Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen are a filmmaker and artist duo. Their films explore existential anxiety, alienation and histories, often using surrealistic imagery, bizarre narratives and body horror as social commentary.

Their films have screened at international film festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023), New Directors/New Films (2023) and BFI London Film Festival (2021). In 2021, with their short film A Man Trembles, they were awarded Best Southeast Asian Director at the Singapore International Film Festival. Their short film The Cup also received the First Prize (Moving Images) of the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in 2021.