account
performance project, 2026
In account, I sit with one person at a time and try to give an account of a performance I made ten years ago — Thesaurus, a work already built on chance. Those ten-year-old traces are both the proof it happened and the material for what happens now.
I revisit that past in the present, and try to predict what comes next. As participants take turns, one's future becomes the next person's past. In this time-based experiment, I sometimes remember wrongly. I guess. I fail — a loop that folds my past, present and future into one another.
In Account, the person I sat with is asked to give their own account of what happened — written or spoken — and it is these accounts, not the encounter, that enter the exhibition. Each witness is asked to describe something different; none of them saw the same thing. Over five days the accounts are retold, re-performed and re-read — translated and retranslated, like a game of Chinese whispers (a phrase that is itself a mistranslation).
Rather than trying to leave no trace to reiterate the ephemerality or for scarcity, account manufactures conflicting ones. There is no original to recover — only the unreliable record of having been witnessed.
It is a piece about what cannot be held: a live event, a past self, the impossibility of giving a faithful account of either? I surrendered myself to chance 10 years ago - and here I surrender myself to the strange afterlife that remains when other people carry it for you.
~
account was commissioned for Morphosis, a duo exhibition by Zhuo Mengting and E Scourti, presented by RCA Curating Contemporary Art (Group 7), 17–21 June 2026, RCA Battersea.
Morphosis takes translation — the metamorphosis an artwork undergoes as it passes from physical encounter into mediated forms — as both its method and material, unfolding as a continuous mechanism of translation that develops across the five days and reaches its 'final' state only on the last.
Curated by Group 7: Emily Daymond-King, Leanne Ghesquiere, Sabina Grinkevich, Seunghui Kang, Sofia Pastor Herranz, William Sharp and George Zhaozhi Zhang.
performance project, 2026
In account, I sit with one person at a time and try to give an account of a performance I made ten years ago — Thesaurus, a work already built on chance. Those ten-year-old traces are both the proof it happened and the material for what happens now.
I revisit that past in the present, and try to predict what comes next. As participants take turns, one's future becomes the next person's past. In this time-based experiment, I sometimes remember wrongly. I guess. I fail — a loop that folds my past, present and future into one another.
In Account, the person I sat with is asked to give their own account of what happened — written or spoken — and it is these accounts, not the encounter, that enter the exhibition. Each witness is asked to describe something different; none of them saw the same thing. Over five days the accounts are retold, re-performed and re-read — translated and retranslated, like a game of Chinese whispers (a phrase that is itself a mistranslation).
Rather than trying to leave no trace to reiterate the ephemerality or for scarcity, account manufactures conflicting ones. There is no original to recover — only the unreliable record of having been witnessed.
It is a piece about what cannot be held: a live event, a past self, the impossibility of giving a faithful account of either? I surrendered myself to chance 10 years ago - and here I surrender myself to the strange afterlife that remains when other people carry it for you.
~
account was commissioned for Morphosis, a duo exhibition by Zhuo Mengting and E Scourti, presented by RCA Curating Contemporary Art (Group 7), 17–21 June 2026, RCA Battersea.
Morphosis takes translation — the metamorphosis an artwork undergoes as it passes from physical encounter into mediated forms — as both its method and material, unfolding as a continuous mechanism of translation that develops across the five days and reaches its 'final' state only on the last.
Curated by Group 7: Emily Daymond-King, Leanne Ghesquiere, Sabina Grinkevich, Seunghui Kang, Sofia Pastor Herranz, William Sharp and George Zhaozhi Zhang.
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