Zou Zhao (Xi Xi)
Bio: Working in the medium of performance, video, and writing, Zou Zhao explores issues surrounding language and ideology, subjectivity and translation, through the materiality of the voice. She currently lives and works between New York City and Singapore. Zou Zhao has recently shown in Singapore Biennale 2016, Luma Foundation, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Artesonje Centre, He Xiang Ning Art Museum 2015, Camden Art Centre, UK 2013. She is the recipient of Berenice Goodwin Award for Performance from Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2013.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Utterances considered bygone by the hegemony contain vital clues of breathing life into rigid structures of contemporary existence. Liberalism in American bourgeois society collapses. In a 1850s throwback, the image of capitalist Bornapartist states loom large. Ideology rooted in race and superiority is advocated through increasingly advanced techniques of control around borders, from nation-states to cultural identities. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. Indeed, the destruction has never ceased, but is ongoing... Being-together is hard, and listening is impossible without practice. I think of art as a space for us to think that task collectively. So, I ask myself constantly about strategies and ways of spending time, which speak to me about techniques of survival. I continue to wonder about efficacy, ways to echo sentiments that appears strange, foreign, and other to myself. What techniques of listening are artists able to contribute to the discourse of dissensus today? I wonder to what degree these practices change the way artists think about work in the studio. And how do ways of working in the studio inform and formulate those aspects of our public life?
Ritual For an Apology (For Singaporeans), (36 minutes, Live performance at Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Singapore Biennale affiliate project, 2016)