Description

House without walls, operated by invisible hands, a symphony of digits, a domestic prosthetic.

Work done is zero when there is no-thing to displace.

Garden of ruin, accumulating isles of junk bathed in a sea of information.

Economy divided by attention, paid in multiples of a face.

Who cares to redeem these homeless voids, their mere existence a programmed obsolescence?

Where the production of anxiety outweighs the compulsion to perform.

Like immortal beings permanently estranged from the world of things, the living and the dead.

An inventory of false movements, sticky, obtuse and worn.

Part domestic interior, part logistics warehouse — this is the space that has materialised from the merging sensibilities of Visual artist Nadim Abbas and Hong Kong choreographer and performer Chan Wai-lok, under the auspices of cross-disciplinary platform No Discipline Limited. Taking as their starting point the prolonged experience of distracted attention that characterises the day-to-day life of information-saturated urban dwellers, Chan and Abbas pose questions about the value of things swept up by the twin waves of economic fluidity and technological progress.

If the nebulous forces driving the world forward today have less to do with possessing things than with consuming information, how does this affect our ability to navigate, let alone shape our own precarious existence, with no-thing to grasp and find one’s bearings? Enter a logistics of movement that does not attempt to escape from the straitjacket of digital lethargy, but rather embraces immobility like an accomplice from the sticky shores of inefficiency and purposelessness.

Occupying a grey zone between exhibition (by day) and performance (by night), No Time To Die: An Inert Liquid Assembly invites audiences to encounter the piece through different levels of immersion and engagement. On immediate impression, the performers’ actions may be likened to the social phenomena of “quiet quitting”, a term used to describe the passive defiance of employees contributing with only the bare minimum required. However, there remains an enigmatic ambiguity in this refusal to perform, simultaneously reflected by the mute and paradoxically performative inventory of packaging material, perpetually dismantled and re-formed around an ever-absent product. Could this be an imaginary capture of the real unreality of the world today?