Wu Tsang's MOVED BY THE MOTION Opens 3/14 at DiverseWorks

DiverseWorks has commissioned Los Angeles-based artist Wu Tsang to create a video installation and performance, Moved by the Motion, that inhabits a space between fiction and documentary. The exhibition is on view at DiverseWorks from March 15 - May 3, 2014. Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and performer who explores the relationship between self, identity, and the narratives that construct them.

Moved by the Motion is the first in a series of performances and works to premiere in Houston by Wu Tsang. Over the course of 2014-15, several related projects will be presented, including a live performance at DiverseWorks as part of CounterCurrent in collaboration with the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts (Saturday April 12, 2014), and a video installation in the exhibition Double Life at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (December 19, 2014 - March 13, 2015).

Moved by the Motion features a 2-channel film installation that explores the sensorial potential of pictures in relation to narrative. Working in a tradition of artist-filmmakers, Tsang looks at the role that fantasy plays in representing social movements. Evoking "the underground" as a site of cultural resistance, he considers how these constructs have been transformed by contemporary life and social media. Playing with sci-fi and biopic film genres, Tsang's filmic installation has been developed in Berlin, Mexico City, and Houston.

Moved by the Motion features an ongoing collaboration with the performer boychild, whose visceral and vivid performances bring a sense of other-worldliness to the body. The live performance on April 12 will take place within the exhibition installation, with an after party to follow.

Central to the exhibition is a 2-channel film entitled A day in the life of bliss, which simultaneously explores cinematic and performative narrative. The film follows BLIS (played by boychild), who inhabits a "near future" world in which our social media avatars and online personas develop their own hive-minded consciousness called LOOKS. Blis, a celebrity-collaborator by day and underground performer by night, discovers her ability to challenge the Looks. Utilizing sci-fi genre tropes and melodrama, the film evokes a classic "outsider" narrative that is complicated by affect, movement, and body politics.