The Purge
Grace Exhibition Space, Manhattan part of New York Live Art Tour 8, Immersive
16 September 2023, 4pm
There is something that we hunger when we live outside of our own culture. We hunger to speak in our own tongue and often push aside social etiquette when we encounter someone who knows our language let alone, a dialect that we grew up with. The most common transference of this ‘cultural hunger’ though, is food. Below is a description of a severely reduced performance, from a more complex durational concept prototype which was akin to excavating one’s cultural memory body through the act of masticating a higher-than-normal quantities of ingredients used in food recipes from one’s original culture.
The Purge was a 20-minute work that was presented on the public pavement in front of Grace Exhibition Space which involved chewing raw turmeric and butterfly pea flowers (separately) to extract the colours which were then blown and dribbled through a bamboo straw on blotting papers as a performance ‘painting’ process. The other artists and audience members criticised that the process was visually too subtle to take place outside, and required a more contained white space with lighting, inside. However the social-location context did open up how the performance was perceived.