Taiwan Pavilion 2017
13 May - 26 November 2017, Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice. Artist: Tehching Hsieh. Curator: Adrian Heathfield. Commissioner: Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
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To realize his long investigation of time and labour, Hsieh installed a worker’s time clock in his studio, and facing it, a 16mm camera suspended from the ceiling. He shaved his head and published a declaration of intent. For an entire year he would attempt to punch in, on the hour every hour, twenty-four hours a day. At each punching he would shoot a single still image on 16mm film. Hsieh’s life during the year was regulated by this recurring act: he had consigned himself to highly restricted conditions of movement and interaction, and a continuous state of physical alteration. Sleep deprivation was pitted against the demand to appear: to be upright and visible. Hsieh’s ordeal resulted in a singular, uncanny artefact: a sixminute film of his tremulous body floating beside the whirling clock, wracked by the rapid passage of an immense wave of time. Each day is radically condensed into a second of film. The performance and its archival mechanisms were stringently verified and analysed: throughout Hsieh was unable to perform only 133 of the possible 8,760 punch-ins. Hsieh’s work evokes the disjunction between the lived perception of time and the social construction of clock time. But its prescience rests in its understanding that the technologies of capitalism would capture and accelerate life itself, turning sentient experience into productive labour.
Performance, New York
(Text: Adrian Heathfield)
© Photo: Haupt & Binder
13 May - 26 November 2017, Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice. Artist: Tehching Hsieh. Curator: Adrian Heathfield. Commissioner: Taipei Fine Arts Museum.