is an artist who works with dance and choreography. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces. Most recently Goh’s work has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, and a range of venues in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America including Performance Space New York, Auto Italia, Baltic Circle, Shedhalle, and Taipei Performing Arts Center. Angela lives and works on Gadigal Land in Sydney, Australia.
In the framework of Protozone11: it’s weird:
Pattern Recognition
Performance, 18.06.23, 17h
Pattern Recognition is a new work by Angela Goh that brings into proximity recurring gestures of the mouth from her previous works, specifically Desert Body Creep (2016), Body Loss (2017), Uncanny Valley Girl (2018) and Sky Blue Mythic (2021). Across these works the mouth has represented an uncanny passageway between the inside and outside of the body. Through the mouth, the body is rendered as both flesh and void, and as a threshold breached—an alien-like tongue escapes, a voice erupts and is sucked back in, liquid is ingested or seeps out, hands reach in only to reemerge as another image of a mouth. The mouth is also a hole, and a hole is necessary to weave, loop, reproduce, channel something through, emerge out of or disappear into. A hole is a topological necessity for turning things inside out. By looping back and collecting these gestures together, Pattern Recognition highlights an evolution of form as well as expanding and entangling a body of work into new territories and trajectories formed by processes of recursion and deviation. Pattern Recognition is originally created as an exhibition of performances at Fine Arts, Sydney in May 2023.
Open Rehearsal of a new work
Performance with Sound by Corin Ileto,
25.06.2023, 17-19h
The Concert
Film, 2022, starts every hour on the half hour
Full colour, sound
36 minutes duration
Unfolding in nine parts, The Concert depicts a series of worlds and characters that appear to span time and space, and which are woven together by a reoccurring object—a large, mysterious, glass-like ring. These recurring rings are in fact the iconic acoustic reflectors that hung in the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall from its opening in 1973 until 2020, when they were decommissioned to make way for new acoustic technology. In The Concert, Goh places this historical artefact inside dreamlike sequences and surreal worlds, to explore how mythology carries memory and meaning through time.
The Concert was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House, as part of New Work Now, enabled by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects.
PAST
Body Loss
Performance, 09.06.23, 18h & 11.06.23, 17h
Beginning at the site of the mouth and expanding out to encompass the entire architecture, Body Loss transforms the limits of the body and the structures that contain it.
A single utterance grows into an endless, ethereal chorus. The voice becomes a sea on which the body is set adrift. Climbing, scaling, bearing down and floating upwards, the body is both freed and constrained. The mouth, fixed open, becomes a gaping hole, a channel, a cipher, through which something might creep in, or out. Through the mouth, the body empties and devours at the same time.
Body Loss is a performance concerned with breaching limitations—bodily, architectural, and cultural—in order to disturb what is constrained, and leak what is uncontainable.