Performance
Art Central’s 2024 Performance programme is presented throughout the Fair, cultivating direct interactions with the audience by staging artistic experiences that come alive through active participation.
Enoch Cheng
Art-is-Here Picnic
2024
Art-is-Here Picnic (2024) challenges the concept of the art fair as a commercial enterprise, bringing art practitioners and visitors to a casual yet intimate encounter in the form of a picnic. Unannounced, intermittent “guerilla-style” performances will take place at various locations throughout the Fair each day, guiding their participants in a curated conversation that gets to the core of conceptual art, with questions such as, “In the year 2024, what can we believe about art?”.
28 March
3pm / 4:30pm
29 March
1pm / 2:30pm
30 March
2pm
31 March
2pm
The duration of this performance is approximately 40 minutes. Please email [email protected] to enquire about space availability.
Scarlet Yu
Planting Tastes
2024
Planting Tastes is a form of culinary choreography that brings participants into an experimental mode of storytelling, centred on culinary exploration. Individual performers trace the genealogy of ingredients through an orchestrated performance designed to evoke a multi-sensorial experience. Participants embark on a journey that navigates the ways in which food ingredients play a role in shaping our social and cultural experiences.
27 March
2 pm
28 March
1pm
29 March
1pm
30 March
12pm
31 March
12pm
The duration of this performance is approximately 1 hour.
Sunayama Norico
A Sultry World
1995–
A celebrated work of contemporary art, Sunayama Norico’s A Sultry World made its debut in 1995 at John Cage’s Rolywholyover A Circus exhibition at the Art Tower Mito in Japan. Having been staged at major venues in North America, Europe and Asia over the past thirty years, this captivating performance has garnered international acclaim and continues to enthral audiences today as much as ever.
Visitors are invited to be part of the performance by entering the protective, intimate space beneath the giant scarlet skirt, which has been infused with the calming scent of lavender. This experience requires trust between the participants and the performer while providing a moment of quietude for guests.
The garment’s scarlet hue holds symbolic significance, representing both power and love, as well as redemption, sacrifice and sin. By blurring the boundaries between public and personal space, Sunayama’s work seeks to bring calm to conflicts and violence that arise from human desire, ethics and social norms.
Sunayama Norico, A Sultry World, is presented in partnership with CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile).
About the Artists
A dancer and performer known for her characteristic mix of humour and provocation, Sunayama Norico often conceives her work from uncomfortable personal experiences. She is a member of the Japanese art collective Dump Type and was involved in all of their performances between 1990 and 2020. At the same time, she also pursued solo projects and founded several artist units, such as THE OK GIRLS, THE BITERS and THE BEST ADULT.
Recently, Sunayama founded the unit un:ten+ with fashion designer Ito Junko, integrating her performance into fashion shows for empowering women. She has since been collaborating with musicians including THE TETORAPOTZ and Umezu Kazutoki Cabaret Band, and presented a body of performative work at the intersections of contemporary art, subculture, cabaret, art and performance.
Enoch Cheng is an artist-curator whose practice spans moving image, installation, curating, dance, events, theatre, writing, fashion, performance, and pedagogy. His work explores the boundaries among various disciplines and traditions, with recurrent themes of belonging, travel, care, cross-cultural history, value, fiction, memory, time, migration, and extinction.
Born in Hong Kong, where she was raised by Thai and Chinese parents, Scarlet Yu currently lives and works in Berlin. The artist’s practice employs autobiography and memory to explore different modes of narration in performance. Yu’s art blurs boundaries between private and public realms by building relationships with her audiences, often exploring themes such as sense, food, personal stories, history, movement and migration. The artist’s collaborative and solo works have been presented in various galleries, theatres, festivals, and museums, such as the Centre Pompidou, Tai Kwun, ADAM Artist Lab (Taiwan), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei Performing Arts Center, and Skulptur Projekte Münster.