In conjunction with SWARM

Exaggerate the movements and stretch the body in arabesque. Make the body take the position of the object, where the object makes the body travel across.

– Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau, performance notes

The Or Gallery is pleased to present 5 Tableaux: (It Bounces Back), a performance and installation work by Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau. Originally conceived at the Fonderie Darling, Montréal, 5 Tableaux expands Lum & Desranleau’s voracious experimentations with the lifespan of materials, how these become animated and form narrative threads and relationships, and the inevitable scuffs and decay incurred through the materials’ exposure to external factors. 2015 marked Lum & Desranleau’s foray into live performance, where they combine dancers, sculpture and music within their immersive silkscreened paper installations, amplifying the performativity of the materials themselves. Objects and materials shape-shift, diffracting direct representations and resisting static identities, becoming imbued with the traces of time, labour and activity.

Collaboration and improvisation are central to Lum & Desranleau’s practice – whether together, with other people, or objects. Their focus on entropy and chance – a physical phenomenon which allows matter to actively engage in the collaborative process – has further informed their belief in the spirit of collective authorship. Amidst the broader culture of chromophobia, they boldly opt for colour, diversity and alterity; against the cult of the new and pristine, they respond with recombinant strategies of DIY and re-use. Drawing from the history of tableaux vivants as a form of protest and appropriation, they add motion and sound, proposing non-hierarchical situations where distinctions between artistic mediums, and between humans and nonhumans, begin to dissolve. These gestures exude resilience, offering strategies in dealing with the accumulated burden of signification, and ways of being within a complex and indeterminate world.

This exhibition is part of a curatorial residency made possible through the Canada Council for the Arts’ assistance to Culturally Diverse Curators.