The Movement-Image is an exhibition and performance series curated by Lecturer in Visual Arts Colleen Asper. It unspools the motion picture to situate performance in a continuum with film.
Xavier Cha, Untitled (caretaker), livestreamed performance with GoPro, collaboration with Ley Gambucci
Untitled (caretaker) is a livestreamed video performance by Xavier Cha, where a performer, who wears a GoPro chest harness, can be seen moving alone in a rehearsal space. For this presentation of Untitled (caretaker) the performer will be at Princeton University. The audience will experience a disorienting view of limbs moving through a remote studio space on campus and livestreamed to Hagan Gallery. The video captures only glimpses of their reflection in the mirror, obscuring access to the full view of the performer’s body. Fragments of a soundtrack can be heard playing simultaneously from four corners of the studio as the performer nears.
Cha originally made Untitled (caretaker) in 2020, at the height of pandemic quarantine in New York. This work, like so much of the artist’s previous works, questions our roles as spectators and our familiarity with and access to modes of viewing and witnessing in our highly mediated cultures. Aiming to examine the experience many share of struggling in isolation—of sheer desperation, alienation, and escapism during moments of panic or internal crisis—Untitled (caretaker) rethinks the performing body’s agency and questions the witnessing of bodies in times of crisis and collapse.
The Movement-Image is supported through the John Sacret Young ’69 Lecture Series fund.
About Xavier Cha
Photo courtesy Xavier Cha
Xavier Cha’s performance-based works and videos grapple with architectures of subjectivity, illusions of agency, what it means to be human with a physical body within racial/technocapitalism. Collaboration is central to the work. Specialized participants, generally performers in fields outside of the contemporary art world, play prominent roles in extracting the sublimated and magnifying an estranged or alienated human experience within inescapable hierarchies of exchange, consumption, and accessibility. Cha directs actors, dancers, or other professionals through focused, controlled scenarios, where the challenged expression of their expertise reveals the body as an enigmatic conduit, a malleable corporeal/ psycho/ social system. Attuned to ways in which the body is watched and conveyed, immersed within heightened circuits of surveillance, marketing, voyeurism and self- spectatorship, they examine how mediating frames—screens, sets, algorithms and the omnipotent lens of the camera—shape behaviors and comfort within one’s own body.
Cha was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York. They received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from UCLA. They have had recent solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2019); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2016); 47 Canal, New York (2015, 2012); Aspect / Ratio, Chicago (2013); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Cha has staged large scale performance works at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017); Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara (2015); INOVA, Milwaukee (2015); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2014); the New Museum (2013), among many other international institutions. Cha was awarded the Harkness/BAM Dance Residency in 2017, a Frieze Film Commission in 2015, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2012, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
Tickets & Details
The performance is free and open to the public; no tickets required.
Directions
Get directions to the Hagan Gallery, located on the first floor at 185 Nassau St. on the Princeton University campus.
Accessibility
The Hagan Gallery is an accessible venue. Visit our Venues & Studios section for access details for each of our individual locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at LewisCenter@princeton.edu.
