Whitechapel Gallery

This season of artists’ films looks at performance – from interventions in the city to early modernist dance and 1970s and 80s pop culture.

Liu Chuang’s two films bring choreographed poetic sequences into everyday places by using urban materials from roadside litter to cars driven in parallel along a city street. While Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude) (2008) by Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová sees a group of majorettes broadcasting in semaphore based on Valentine de Saint-Point’s 1912 manifesto of the same name, where she calls for the recognition of strong women in society.

Dan Finsel’s video, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (1) (2009) shows the artist inhabiting a frenetic character based on an amalgam of TV and film personalities, using performance to explore the construction of identity. Alongside this Sriwhana Spong’s film Costume for a Mourner (2010) is a reconstruction from archival photographs of the dancing and costumes from Le Chant du Rossignol, originally performed by the Ballets Russes in 1920.