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’, drew on the extreme circadian rhythms of polar inhabitants as a metaphor. Through a series of commissioned performances, the programme considered 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, the programme asked 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 invited 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 presented a surreal “walk-in-cinema”, beckoning audiences into a multi-sensory experience of light manipulation and spatial metamorphosis.
The exhibition space transformed into a corridor of memories constructed from humble cardboard boxes. Within this organically sprawling structure, audiences moved alongside performers through the open vessels, peering into fragmented projections cast onto their interior walls.
These phantasmagoric moving images drew from Au’s extensive archive of music videos and cinematic essays. Through varying loop frequencies, fragments of the past were intricately dismantled and reassembled, allowing latent memories to emerge as new sensory narratives.
28 March
1 pm
29 March
2 pm
Isabella Isabella
I see blood in the sky., 2026
Performance
Through 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 moved within a series of textural, multi-layered suits that evoked bodies in profound transformation. These garments served 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 gave 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 tightened into restraint; a hold contracted into confinement; tenderness flickered into violence. As the work navigated through states of connection, tension, and release, it revealed the entwined dynamics of nurture and control that proximity sets in motion.
25 March
3 pm
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 donned 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 entered 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 assumed 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
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) was a new interactive performance that explored the intricate triangulation of movement, light, and shadow. Challenging the boundaries between tangible gesture and intangible projection, the work reimagined shadows not merely as visual phenomena, but as performative extensions of embodied musicality.
In Shadow Work, Ng integrated 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 triggered multi‑choral electronic responses, generating a continuous feedback loop between physical instrumentation and synthesised sound.
26 March
3 pm
