Soojin Chang’s video BXBY is a year-long performance project that merges forms of semi-fictional documentary and ritual practice, following Chang as a hybrid, shape-shifting being trying to learn to reproduce. Drawing from chimeric figures within creation stories of the British Isles and the diasporic cultures of Chang and her collaborators (Choulay Mech, Jade O'belle, Anika Ahuja, and Aditya Surya Taruna a.k.a Kasimyn), Chang positions her own hybrid body – part animal, part woman, part alien – as a site of technological interaction and as a locus of ongoing experiment. Sampling diverse scientific methods such as IVF, biohacking, and voluntary self-touch, BXBY addresses the legacy of colonial science to open out into wider affirmation of queer, interspecies kinship and reliance. From this position, BXBY aims to spur a purposeful discussion on notions of sacrifice, animality, objecthood and in/visibility; looking in particular to animist techniques of embodying and remembering.
BXBY
Soojin Chang
35 minutes, 2 seconds, 2022
Project details
Jerwood/FVU Awards: 2022 Edition
Leeds Art Gallery and University of Leeds
17 November 2022 - 22 January 2023
Media
Press
Ocula | Soojin Chang’s Animal-Alien-Woman Makes Contact at Jerwood Space
23 November 2022