Untitled: darkness (2020)- by Tosh Basco
Originally performed Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 2:00pm
Zürich-based performance artist Tosh Basco presented an online performance in conjunction with the exhibition A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS. The performance was followed by a conversation with Basco's collaborator, artist Wu Tsang.
Untitled: darkness is a performance in the liminal and interstitial. Part of Tosh Basco's Untitled series, this new work was made in conversation with the filmic technologies of the camera, screens and sight. The performance worked with/in and through that which is unseeable, to insist on modes of being that exist outside of generalized conceptions of visibility. How can devotional practices teach us to see through? How might one dance the space between? Through improvisational movement, Basco explored the kinetic dimension of the unseen, traversing and opening up a terrain between language, seeing and touching. This performance was part of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance's Performing Artist Case Studies, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Tosh Basco is a movement-based performance artist whose work operates through improvisation as a mode of survival and world building in the liminal, performative space where becoming meets representation. Adamant about the visceral experience of live visual performance, she makes a case for how the movement of form can communicate what remains impenetrable in images, and through language. Her performances have been presented at the Gropius Bau, the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MOCA Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ICA London, and Berghain. Tosh Basco has toured with Mykki Blanco, and collaborated with Korakrit Arunanondchai and Wu Tsang, as well as the streetwear label Hood By Air.