Key Words
Ancient Technologies, Asylum Seekers, Border, Borders, Deconstructing the Exotic, Queer, Transcendence,About
The block focuses on the continuum between contemporary practice and ancient Asian arts, ranging from Sanskrit theatre (Kuriyamum) of 1000 years ago, to Thai classical painting, to Japanese Noh theatre. How can contemporary pieces draw from the conceptual frameworks of these ancient arts?
In particular, Block 20 extends beyond aesthetics to question where borders lie today. How can we initiate creative interventions which would transcend these borders? What are creative individuals suggesting as strategies for transcendence in the foreseeable future?
The block juxtaposes young asylum seekers who are suspended in a threshold zone between memory and a sustainable future in a new country with ethnic conflicts and religious movements which have banned artforms based on charges of animistic shamanic beliefs.
The urban Asian societies of today, with their increasing embrace of consumerism and functionality, have relegated traditional arts into a rarefied, endadngered species. How do these ancient practices fight back and continue to engage the life of the future? Some of them have harnessed the border itself to create further borders of ‘high’ esteem, such as the classical, hermetic value of the Noh theatre of Japan.
Block 20 further proposes the precision of these traditional forms (which are based on codified instruction) to be ancient technologies, programmed by books such as the Sanskrit Naiyshasrro, the bible of performance in India.
Concurrent with the strategy of ancient technologies, which advocates one way of transcending borders, the practice of tsunami.net, a new media art group, also interrogates technology. Working with the students of Block 20, tsunami.net points to the continuing limitations in the technological wave of the future.
In the middle of Block 20, the students will be introduced to EXOTICA! They will be encouraged to transgress borders through entering the performative dimension of everyday fantasy, bondage, and adventurous sex of BDSM in sessions with Fetish Diva Midori and Bangkok queer artist Michael Shaowanasai.
Juxtaposed with these ancient technologies and EXOTICA! will be the interrogation of museum culture in order to reveal the politics of representation. All emotive strategies to the museum for a new age will be examined with the students informed by inclusion, which is the antithesis of borders.
In the final phase of Block 20, students will bring everyday life and daily narratives into the space of art. Challenging the borders of art itself, students will document narratives on the margins. Through a series of a fractures, disjunctures and a subsequent wondrous reconstruction, the ultimate transcendence comes through the seduction of a specific viewpoint which disrupts and realigns.
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Printed Matter
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Block 20 – The Continuum: Ancient Technologies, Borders And Transcendence (featuring EXOTICA!)
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