Purge
part of New York Live Art Tour 8, Immersive
Grace Exhibition Space, Manhattan
16 September 2023, 4pm
There is something that we hunger when we live outside of our own culture. We hunger to speak in our own tongue and often push aside social etiquette when we encounter someone who knows our language, let alone, a dialect that we grew up with. The most common transference of this ‘cultural hunger’ though, is food. Below is a description of a severely reduced performance, from a more complex durational concept prototype. Purge is akin to excavating one’s cultural memory-body, through the act of masticating a higher-than-normal quantities of ingredients used in food recipes from one’s original culture.
Purge was presented as a 20-minute work on the public pavement in front of Grace Exhibition Space. It involved chewing raw turmeric and butterfly pea flowers (separately) to extract the colours, which were then blown and dribbled through a bamboo straw, on blotting papers as a performance ‘painting’ process. The other artists and audience members criticised that the process was visually too subtle to take place outside, and required a more contained white space with lighting, inside. However the social-location context did open up how the performance was perceived.
“There is much to say about the practice of ruminescing (the act of ruminating combined with reminiscing). There is a strong sense of excavating into memories that run deep in parts of the body with the mind. There is nostalgia mixed into this act of remembrance. It also connects me with people from my background who may hold these memories because these ingredients are shared through taste, socialisation and customs. However, I am attending to these food materials in an unfamiliar manner, and this shifts the quality of attention that they are normally associated with.
The holding in the mouth of such an ordinary ingredient in my life is significant because it is ordinary only for people who live within a certain geographical area from where I grew up. The occasions in which these ingredients would pass through our palates, who we would be gathered with, and where we would be able to taste it if it wasn’t used in our homes. It reaches deep and outwards. Hence why I describe it as materials that hold a cultural memory, which pervade the olfactory system. Bearing in mind that these ingredients would often be used, mixed in, as part of a recipe. It is unusual to chew and taste them in such quantities and in isolation…”
