Calving

2-channel video projection with stereo sound, performance, 2018

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Costume design by Jing Li
Video by Mengtai Zhang
Installation and performance at the Fridman Gallery, NYC 2018

Accompanied with astonishing sight and sound, calving of icebergs, etymologically cognatic with calving as bearing a calf, is the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier - an important yet poorly understood component of global mass loss of glaciers and polar ice sheets. Some scientists argue that the hierarchy of glacier calving process could be classified into first, second, and third orders, with different scales, directions, and levels of forces superimposed upon one another, causing potentially dangerous calving events that they have yet been able to predict.

The work juxtaposes the calving of glaciers with the shifts in the tradition of Dong/Kam people, an ethnic minority that lives in the southwest of China, for whom the lack of a written language is supplemented by a rich tradition in songs. Their polyphonic group singing, a sound that has been orally transmitted for hundreds of years, amplified for a need of harmonic national sounds under the Soviet model, muted during the cultural revolution, is now reheard at the beat of the cultural tourism industry.