VENICE.- Arise, Angela Su’s presentation for the Biennale Arte 2022, conveys a speculative narrative through interlocking fictional perspectives. The act of levitation serves as an organising metaphor that reappears throughout Su’s drawings, moving image works, embroideries, and installations. The artist assumes the guise of a fictional alter ego to explore myriad cultural and political implications of rising in the air. Levitation speaks to both light and weighty matters; it moves between visceral bodily experiences and dream-like states of rapture that leave the body behind.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new video work, The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O (2022). This pseudodocumentary tells the story of Lauren O, a fictional character who believes she can levitate, and her involvement with Laden Raven, an activist group catalysed by the US anti-war movement of the 1960s. The name Lauren O derives from the main character in American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, who levitates in a dream. The name also refers to Anna O, the pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim, a famous case study of hysteria treatment associated with neurophysiologist Josef Breuer.
Su’s video comprises found footage and clips of a new performance by the artist. Weaving together fact and fiction, the work suggests an alternative space for action and disruption. In this film, Laden Raven is an organisation founded by funambulist Fern Andra. The group’s members are vaudeville performers who oppose the Cold War and US military intervention abroad. They took part in the March on the Pentagon, a massive demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1967. Together with other activists, the Laden Raven members proposed to exorcise the evil spirits in the Pentagon by ‘levitating’ the structure. Lauren O’s journey begins a course of events that brings her into difficult political struggles across time.
Traces of Lauren O and Laden Raven are embedded in the exhibition’s constellation of artwork, which invites the audience to journey through Su’s fictional world. Playscape for the Feathered Girl (2022) consists of a circus ring, a swing, and posters that are
situated in the courtyard outside the main exhibition. The swing is too high to sit on, and the circus ring hovers above the ground: the scene resembles a circus playground, but one imbued with an unsettling suggestion of risk rather than joyful energy. Evocative images of circus performances continue inside the exhibition with a video installation suspended from the ceiling. Tiptoeing the Kármán Line (2022) features found footage of shows by trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, and dancers.
Su’s iconic drawings and hair embroideries are displayed against bold red curtains that span the entire room. Suspended in the centre of the space is Laden Raven (2022), a three-metre-wide embroidery of a human baby resting peacefully inside the great bird’s womb. This melding of animal and human is also touched upon in the ink drawing Wicked Wiccan Wicker Wish (2019), which meditates on the concept of human cloning and the possibility of the human body being conjured by witchcraft and metaphysics, or created through the amalgamation of various other organisms. Rorschach Test No. 3 (2016), an ink drawing on two layers of drafting film brings together the precision of scientific drawing with a mythic sensibility. The symmetrical composition, evocative of an ink blot test, contains a universe of doubled biomorphic forms that evoke dense vegetation, coral growth, and human bodily organs. Rorschach tests are usually used by diagnosticians in psychology to elicit not the viewer’s logical faculties, but the deeply intuitive side of the human psyche.
Surrounding this psychosocial manifestation is a collection of biomorphic forms resembling detailed anatomical drawings created by Su from various series. The drawing Rosy Nobody No. 2 (2017) depicts imagery suggestive of amputation as an expression of trans-humanism and disempowerment. A set of small embroideries from the Sewing Together My Split Mind (2020–2021) series are elegantly placed in the corner of the room. These depictions of sewn body parts are gestures of physical risk and quiet acts of rebellion. They suggest the negation of expression while alluding to the history of a particularly intense form of protest in which activists have made their voices heard by appearing with their mouths sewn shut. Su’s drawings and embroideries convey the physical and psychological experiences of living in precarious times.
In the context of this exhibition, the doubling and hybridity reflected in the drawings connect to Su’s investigation of alter egos and split identities. This doubling act is also echoed in the single-channel video projection Tack Tack Tack (2017), in which a pair of blunt scissors stabs the gaps between the fingers of the artist’s splayed hands at an accelerating pace.
Pyramidal panels cover the walls and floor of the space where The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O is played on the screen. While watching the film, viewers piece together the puzzles and clues gathered while navigating the exhibition. Su appears in the film, tightly bound by ropes. She is lifted into the air, as if levitating.
In Arise, Su creates a new reality from an assemblage of various contemporary expressions of how an individual can confront a changed and changing world. Fiction allows us to imagine a space where we can explore ideas that cannot be confronted directly and is a timely device given this moment of political uncertainty.
Freya Chou
Guest Curator
