Performance
Endless Night and Midnight Sun
As artificial intelligence undergoes radical technological leaps, workloads once measured in months or years are now compressed into mere days or hours. The old idiom “a day feels like a year”, once a descriptor of agonising endurance, now acquires a contemporary irony as it mirrors the hyperproductivity of AI. Simultaneously, our contemporary experience of time has drifted into disarray. Research in psychology suggests that the digital acceleration of the post-2000 era, compounded by the existential pressures of the 2020 global pandemic, has fundamentally reshaped our neural experience of time, flattening memory and compressing our perceived distance between past and future.
Art Central’s 2026 performance programme, titled ‘Endless Night and the Midnight Sun’, draws on the extreme circadian rhythms of polar inhabitants as a metaphor. Through a series of commissioned performances, the programme considers the lingering depth of long‑form storytelling, the primal impulse toward ceaseless, nocturnal consumption, the tensions inherent in unending cycles of care, the shifting chiaroscuro of secluded memory, and the act of gazing into the deep blue of the long night, seeking resonance within its vast, desolate silence.
Within the realm of the “Midnight Sun”, light fuels an unbounded momentum of social energy and productivity; yet within the “Endless Night”, we are pulled toward stillness and restoration. In an age ruled by the cult of efficiency, how might we reclaim an internal rhythm that is genuinely our own?
The “Endless Night” does not signify perpetual darkness, but rather an entry into the “blue moment”—a state in which, as the clamor fades and our senses are honed to their keenest, one may discern the purest spectrum of light. These performances invite audiences to slow their breathing, and within the fissures of a temporality increasingly compressed by AI, to reconsider what time might hold for the human condition.
Zoie Yung
Curator
Susie Au
Memory In Motion — Walk-In-Cinema, 2026
Performance
Amidst the bustle of an art fair setting, Susie Au presents a surreal “walk-in-cinema”, beckoning audiences into a multi-sensory experience of light manipulation and spatial metamorphosis.
The exhibition space transforms into a corridor of memories constructed from humble cardboard boxes. Within this organically sprawling structure, audiences move alongside performers through the open vessels, peering into fragmented projections cast onto their interior walls. Visitors may choose to sit in quiet observation, capture fleeting moments with their cameras, or simply let the drifting projections wash over their skin
These phantasmagoric moving images draw from Au’s extensive archive of music videos and cinematic essays. Through varying loop frequencies, fragments of the past are intricately dismantled and reassembled, allowing latent memories to emerge as new sensory narratives.
28 March
1 pm
29 March
2 pm
Image: TianYuen, <Choreocinema – Riding on Wave>, 2018. Art project. Choreographed by Nini Dongnier. Conceived and directed by Susie Au. Courtesy of the artists.
Isabella Isabella
I see blood in the sky., 2026
Performance
In her autobiographical performance I see blood in the sky. (2026), Isabella Isabella deepens her ongoing exploration of the body as a medium for shared inquiry, care, and acts of resistance. The artist moves within a series of textural, multi-layered suits that evoke bodies in profound transformation. These garments serve not just as costumes but as active co-performers, their shifting textures and volumes intricately mapping the body’s metamorphosis. Through a choreography of movement and contact, the performance gives form to the mutable structures of familial intimacy, inviting reflection on how our experiences and identities are continually shaped in relation to others.
Gestures of embrace tighten into restraint; a hold contracts into confinement; tenderness flickers into violence. As the work navigates through states of connection, tension, and release, it reveals the entwined dynamics of nurture and control that proximity sets in motion.
25 March
3 pm
Image: Isabella Isabella. Courtesy of the artist.
Jiaming Liao
IYKYK (ON AIR), 2026
Performance
“IYKYK” (if you know you know) is an internet colloquialism signalling content intended only for a specific in‑group. Jiaming Liao’s practice examines how image production in mass media shapes bodily expression and its entanglement with desire. For this performance, Liao dons his signature muscle suit to foreground how beauty and masculinity are culturally defined within an era of intensified commercialisation and technological mediation.
The work simulates an influencer’s e-commerce livestream, constructing a hybrid scene that spans virtual and physical space. Through interactive participation, audiences enter a collaborative act of “transformation”, directly altering the artist’s visual appearance with their own hands. As the boundaries between consumption and artistic creation grow increasingly porous, each participant assumes the role of co‑creator, collectively forging the contemporary mediated archetype formed at the juncture of lived reality and digital representation.
24 March
3 pm
27 March
3 pm
Image: Jiaming Liao. Courtesy of the artist.
Chaklam Ng
Shadow Work, 2026
Performance
Karen Yu (Performer)
Taurin Barrera (Projection Artist)
Adonian Chan (Sound Artist)
Building on his earlier instrument‑work Voice of Silhouette (2025), Chaklam Ng’s Shadow Work (2026) is a new interactive performance that explores the intricate triangulation of movement, light, and shadow. Challenging the boundaries between tangible gesture and intangible projection, the work reimagines shadows not merely as visual phenomena, but as performative extensions of embodied musicality.
In Shadow Work, Ng integrates live percussion with object manipulation, activating the instrument through rhythmic physicalities. A percussionist’s gestures cast shifting silhouettes onto the sound installation, which in turn trigger multi‑choral electronic responses, generating a continuous feedback loop between physical instrumentation and synthesised sound.
26 March
3 pm
Image: Chaklam Ng, Voice of Silhouette, 2025. Mixed media, 1200 x 1200 x 1000 mm. Photo credit: Jockey Club Future Laboratory of Arts Tech. Courtesy of the artist.
