VARIATIONS ON BROKEN LINES (2018)
Installation: Multi-channel video projection, wooden sculptures, video sculpture, holographic panel, mirrors and prisms.
Variations on Broken Lines considers what it means to dwell in a liminal condition, suspended between states, identities, layered temporalities, and mediated spatialities. Memory, ritual, and presence unfold through the threshold where embodied experience converges with digital projection, performing rites of passage that emerge in the transitional space between the tangible and the immaterial, between presence and disappearance.
This work was conceived as the world was entering a global rite of passage during the pandemic, and emerged at the end of two years of research into notions of the liminal in ritual, performance, and identity, and cultural practice transformation. The two processes—personal research and collective upheaval—converged during the lockdown in 2020, which cast the world into a mirroring global rite of passage: a collective separation from habitual space-times, a state of uncertainty, and an ambiguous suspension, manifested through screens and virtual grids. It marked a spatial-temporal threshold—an in-between world inhabited simultaneously yet distantly.
The anthropologist Victor Turner, in Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage, describes this as a state of being "betwixt and between"—an experience of suspension and ambiguity, imbued with mysticism and transition, and of dwelling in a threshold. This temporal–spatial simultaneity is a condition of being neither here nor there, everywhere and nowhere at once—a shifting perception of time and ritual as experienced through light and movement.
drawing from ethnography, performance studies, and my own self-reflexive observations, I came to see liminality as a generative site, where experiences of in-betweenness—across space, time, and ritual— became an emancipatory and creative tool.
Multi-channel video is projected onto wooden sculptural surfaces and through mirrors, prisms, and holographic film—creating variations, glitch, slowness, doubleness, refraction, and diffraction. This produces a temporary suspension of structure that allows for multiplicity, ambiguity, and becoming. Through the temporal layering of physical and virtual, of light, shadow, and movement, the coexistence of multiple temporalities creates a palpable experience, and presence unfolds across screens and skins.
The multi-channel video projection is composed from archival recording of performances I created in collaboration with dancers, performers, as well as recordings of personal family ceremonies. Digitally choreographed into a three-channel screendance assemblage, the projection weaves together a gestures, rituals, and embodied inscriptions. The project considers performance—whether through calligraphic forms, geometric symbols, dance, or movement—as a transformative act rendered as a temporal thresholds unfolding cinematically.
This research-creation project is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
Acknowledgment and contribution: Cinzia Kavalieri, Maria Kravchenko, Mahsa Alikhani, Sebastian Ureamuno, Marc-André Weibezahn, Diana Yoo, Kunstbereit e.V Berlin, Dr. Ruth Del Fresno Gulliem Special thanks to: Suzy Lake & Professor Yvonne Singer and Yam Lau.
