Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
Déjà vu
The Scary Ones
Those Scary Ones is a body of work where I perform as various characters wearing the recognisable clothing of racists, bigots and fundamentalists.
I recite oratory spoken by their antitheses. for example, a Ku Klux Klan member utters the words of Martin Luther King or a terrorist speaks the words of Eckhart Tolle.
I have done this in order to take control of these disturbingly ghoulish figures and imbue them with some much needed positivity and benevolence.
This body of work also includes myself carrying my head in Beheaded as well as a group of several other dark characters that espouse disquieting messages in the piece Foreboding.