Wu Tsang - Under Cinema

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker, artist and performer based in Berlin and New York. Her practice explores states of connectedness and "in-between-ness," often manifesting as collaboration, or in the merging of disciplines such as performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Her work focuses on moments or narratives of displacement and belonging, and uses them to collapse the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Tsang’s filmmaking style is characterised by a tendency towards magic realism, or moments of fantasy within realistic portrayals. Her playful approach to fluid representation opens up possibilities within the spaces between reality and fiction, or intent and interpretation.

The exhibition Under Cinema investigates how artistic practice, and its products, are positioned to challenge dominant narratives. The world premiere of a newly commissioned film of the same name features the acclaimed American singer-songwriter Kelela, and is staged as a site-specific installation for FACT’s Gallery 2, which is located under a cinema space. This is complemented by the UK premiere of We hold where study (2017): a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning, enacting a series of duets both within and between images.

Together, these works form an investigation into issues of voice and representation through innovative filmmaking, questioning the relationship between reality and images, as well as the viewer’s gaze.

The new work Under Cinema is co-comissioned by FACT, Liverpool and Warp Records, with the support of Goethe-Institut, London.

We hold where study was commissioned by curator Nadja Argyropoulou for Polyeco Art Initiative.

This exhibition is a collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, where Devotional Document (Part 1) took place earlier this year.

Related events
FACT will present a wide-ranging programme, Refuge, which will investigate the notion of "refuge" or "safe-space," in relation to art (and by extension to cultural institutions). These events will consider how art and artistic approaches can represent, or begin to give a platform to, a diversity of narratives usually underrepresented in mainstream media and discourse.

About Wu Tsang
Wu Tsang’s films, installations, performances, and sculptures move fluidly between documentary, activism, and fiction. Her projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MCA (Chicago), MOCA (Los Angeles), Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), SANFIC (Santiago), Hot Docs Festival (Toronto), and South by Southwest Film Festival (Austin). Her first feature film WILDNESS (2012) premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in The Ungovernables New Museum Triennial in New York. She has received grants from Creative Capital, the Warhol Foundation, and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. Wu Tsang is based between Berlin, Athens and Los Angeles, and is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.