Wu Tsang, Visiting Artist Lecture 2017

Interdisciplinary artist Wu Tsang speaks about her practice that weaves in video, performance, and grassroots activism. For Tsang, voice, reenactment and appropriation are all ideas that help shape her work. Voice in particular allows Tsang to address questions of representation and questions around liveness and images, allowing her to reflect on the fantasy of community; a fantasy that Tsang has come to realize can only at times exist temporarily through these act of representation. For Tsang, exhibiting her work in a white cube setting and dealing with institutional contexts of art viewing has led to all kinds of gazes being attached. Tsang also talks about her ongoing collaboration with Fred Moten, and the importance of constantly discussing ideas about art with a community. Tsang’s conversations with Fred in particular has led to the two of them coining a phrase entitled “devotional documents”: image making as a ritual practice. Tsang comments on this phrase as a way to allow people to see the image as being a window that provides a possibility of capturing our sociality as not something that is always accurate, but as something that can be lovingly distorted in order to add new truths.