Amulet Body
participatory performance-installation,
commissioned for Year of the Dragon group exhibition curated by Con Gerakris
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
10 Feb - 31 Mar 2024
All images of the Amulet Body opening performance on 10 Feb 2024 taken by Alan Schacher.
Amulet Body is a performance installation that deconstructs and reimagines systems of divination and sacred-word protection. The work synthesises material symbolism, the body and participatory choreographic methods to expand and loosen the imaginative space, thus creating a dynamistic environment. Ho exposes the machinations of divination, suggesting such rituals are not about certainty but rather exist as a system of techniques responding to physical and spiritual patterns in the world.
text by Con Gerakaris, curator and writer
The collective divination performance and installation ‘Amulet Body’ comprises a set of 150 handwritten notes attached to wooden spindles, each entwined with a long black cotton cord. The koan-like texts, written by myself and performance participants, are derived from the outcomes of public one-to-one divination performances and through a public call-out process. The spindles form the basis of my installation and performance garment: a custom-made cloak made by Jennifer H Chua and Tania Castaing, onto which 100 white loops are sewn and 50 white loops attached to my hair. Other material include metal hook, turnbuckle and circular tray courtesy of Alan Schacher.
Action:
To initiate my performance, ritual assistants will formally dress me in the white robe and offer me a head-dress. They then roll the spindle across the floor, unwrapping the thread and revealing the pre-written note, and gesture to the audience as an invitation to participate. Audience members roll the spindle across the floor, unwrapping the thread and revealing the pre-written note. After meditating on this text, the participant will tie the black thread to the white loops attached to me. After all 150 spindles are attached, I begin a ceremonial-like dance, drawing this complex entanglement through space.
Participants engage with divination concepts that offer expansive possibilities to both individuals and groups through the interaction between intuition and the subconscious. This project collaborates with members from multiple communities, asking them to consider traditional or ancient methods of communication and interaction through the relatedness occurring between texts drawn at random and the symbolism of ‘inordinary’ actions by myself and the group.
Adjacent to this formal participatory performance which opens and ends the exhibition, are weekly one-to-one street divination performance sessions held on 17, 24 Feb, 2, 9, 16, 23 Mar from 11.30am to 2.30pm. These take place at Thomas Street about three minutes from 4A Centre, bringing participants into meaningful collaborative interactions through conversations and embodied actions used to disrupt and allow insights to a situation or a question. The main material used are 7 X 2.4m dowels, cut up into different lengths (all different measurements of the cut -up dowels written at the ends with an ink colour associated to the original dowel) and re-constructed back by tying them up with white and black cotton twine.
These sessions, titled Sounds Like Divination was first experimented on the streets of Manhattan, New York in September 2023 as part of a series of public intervention processes shared with artist Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith, after Con Gerakaris approached me to be part of 4A Centre’s group exhibition Year of the Dragon.
