| |
Practice
Artist’s Statement, Lucia King
I work across the media
of video installation, filmmaking and performance. All of these practices
are underscored by a continual engagement with drawing. Expanding from
this practice, I have curated intercultural projects between India, the UK
and the Netherlands. Resident in the Netherlands (1990-2000) and in India
(2000 -2005), I am now based in the UK.
Film works
The narratives of my early films emerged directly from the ‘surreal’
sculptural environments I was making. These works were shown in art museum
contexts in the Netherlands (such as the Stedelijk Museum) and
international film festivals (the Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco
Short Film Festival, and the Oberhausen Film Festival among others).
A re-orientation in my practice came when I re-located to India; the work
then becoming directly motivated by socio-political concerns. Based for
that period in New Delhi, I made art-documentary films and directed
performance projects as a form of activism, collaborating with various
Indian co-partners. We focused on marginalized communities, mostly from
New Delhi (including gays, economic refugees and a number of women-focused
projects). The visual language characteristic of my early work found
resonances in India’s contemporary culture, where myths and epic
performance genres are woven into everyday life. I also worked during
these five years in museum interior design and in production design for
feature films and for stage.
Current directions
Now a UK resident again, I am reconciling the ‘human interest’ with the
surreal or visionary aspects of both career phases, returning to a
practice of making moving-image artworks for art gallery contexts. My
current work is focused on how we create a sense of place in the
environment; a place that represents our place in the wider world. I
challenge how the viewer establishes a sense of site by creating
landscapes and scenarios that collapse realities seen from various
viewpoints. This continues a thematic development from earlier works, such
as the video installation At Play. At Play traces how a group of actors on
a film set in India shuttle between the heightened reality they inhabit as
actors, and their ‘off set’ personalities. This work characteristically
looks at the human phenomena of how we create parallel realities that
intersect with the everyday.
Drawings
In my current drawing practice, I am working on a series of 2.5m x 1m
landscapes that are in the process of disintegrating and re-shaping
themselves. These images recall journeys through the body’s interior, yet
also have a connection with film scenographies. The drawings will be
presented as installations in which the public is immersed in an altered
sense of place, site and the body.
The drawing work informs the moving image practice in the sense that both
are derived from an ongoing movement between ‘distance and dialogue’ in my
own and my audience’s dialogue with the work.
Distance and dialogue
may be understood in relation to the following:
-
The geo-politics of
performance and visual art forms between ‘developed and ‘developing’
countries, based on experience of having lived and worked in India.
-
The archetypes of
intimacy in relationships; looking at the ‘distance and dialogue’ therein.
This is a recurring theme in the interdisciplinary artworks.
Within all my projects
‘dialogue’ is driven by a need to address the distances created by:
colonial divide:
In the case of my visual art practice this manifests itself in a continual
interrogation of the creative industries that at times still operate
within colonial paradigms. In the case of curating work, I established a
practitioner’s international artist-in-residency programme with two
partners from India that showcased visual artists and directors’ works in
Delhi, inviting international artist participants for temporary exchanges
and participatory projects.
differences of sexual orientation:
For example, I wrote & directed a docu-fictional full length play and a
short film that contextualized gay and lesbian relationships as these
exist in contemporary Delhi (March 2005).
schisms created by urban poverty: I worked with inhabitants of Delhi’s
‘slum dwellings’, street residents and children from elite schools,
looking at perceptions of ‘success and failure’ in their terms. Outputs: a
30 minute film, workshop processes and interventions within these
communities.
cultural displacement:
My re-location to the UK after five years in India has resulted in the
production of artworks that focus on cultural identity and its
displacement. Whilst in India, I also worked with refugeed Tibetan
children understanding how they became assimilated into Indian culture. I
used performance improvisation as a tool for dialogue and filming here.
In all of the above
projects, the social constellations that create otherness or define the
status of artists as outsiders were critiqued through collaborating with
the concerned communities. International and local NGOs (in India) or Arts
Councils and new media promoters (in Europe) commissioned or funded these
works. Intercultural dialogue has spanned from working at the grassroots
to analysing the discipline of performance at a global policy level. From,
for example, finding body-language based improvisation methods to work
with Tibetan refugee school children who spoke no Hindi or English,
exploring their assimilation in Indian culture; to researching the World
Bank’s policy for supporting performing arts heritage in South Asia,
(commissioned by the Asian Heritage Foundation, a foundation that
internationally promotes performance arts from South Asia).
I developed
dialogue-based performance strategies that relied strongly on physicality
and collective devising, working collaboratively with Indian co-partner/
dramatist, Smita Bharti (2000-2005) Our contrasting approaches to
performance (mine, European-derived; hers, Indian) created a dialogue in
itself about our distinct priorities in performance production and
artistic motivation.
Rather than issues of
'truth' and 'authenticity' of the finished product, my aim has been to
question, 'what gives me the authority to question and engage the
project's participants in the first place?' This questioning often
foregrounds ethical issues so that they become integrated into all
creative decision-making.
Prior to 2000, I made
interactive video artworks for urban public spaces in Holland where
performance was always mediated through the camera. My role here was as
the writer/ director/ at times also camera-operator. Moving into
collaboration and re-moving technological complexity in my work in India,
I wanted to return to the immediacy and risk of live performance and gain
experience on ensemble devising processes.
Themes of interdisciplinary
artworks
There is another stream of my practice that looks at personal relationship
issues and archetypal language and poetic forms therein. At this source,
the practice of painting and drawing are closely allied with this. A poet
can be a poet in visual as well as literary form simultaneously. This best
describes my orientation. There is a mythic archetype (derived from but
moving beyond Hindu thought) that presumes an exchange of the divine with
human being in the play or ‘leela’ of love; it is combined with the idea
that we shuttle between the delusional and the absolute in this dialogue.
In the friction between social conditioning and the emotional ambiguity of
intimate relationships, cultural and sexual identities are destabilized.
Having lived and worked
in both Western and Asian cultures, I am differently impacted by this
conditioning myself, according to where I am situated. ‘Distance and
dialogue’ as a theme in my work, therefore, also includes dilemmas around
‘being other’ or ‘being enmeshed’ in one’s own or another’s culture.
Working processes that informs teaching
When teaching the devising of performance or moving image, I often refer
to techniques that come from drawing and its capacity to capture visual
narrative. The creative orders of chaos, determinism, chance and change
are seen as instrumental to the student’s engagement in the work. I
encourage that scenarios are drawn before they are written; the dialogue
emerging from visual diagrams and structures that later evolve into a
finished performance or film. The physicality of the players, and the
relationship of camera to subject is also a key area of focus. I have
worked extensively with the ‘storyboard’ as a devising method in teaching
performance studies, time-based media and in shooting documentaries.
Identifying the most
appropriate audience context for student projects (whether for stage/
site-specific performance/ film/ or TV broadcast) is often a complex
matter. Therefore, much of my teaching practice has been devoted to
exploring issues of public distribution. In terms of visual artworks, ‘the
exhibition space’ is frequently tested theoretically.
When instructing performance for stage, I have a repertoire of performance
styles that link back to my experience in filmmaking, and early history as
a performance artist. Questions of how meaning is created through time
duration have been analysed and shared with students. In the teaching of
moving image I am most interested in how associative logic can become
translated as an editing principle. More specific examples of the
institutions and courses I have taught can be found on the
CV page.
Home
|