19min

Talk

Editathon Art+Feminism / Vaginal Davis et Wu Tsang

The Paris edition of the Art+Feminisms Editathon designed by Flora Katz, alongside Wu Tsang, invited the public to contribute through two days of meetings and writing.

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker and performance artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary in works that explore hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself.

Tsang re-imagines racialized, gendered representations beyond the visible frame to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm. Wu Tsang’s work as an artist emerges from collaboration, particularly as a co-organizer of a weekly nightclub called "Wildness", which was a flashpoint for underground art and community activism in Los Angeles. 

Taking place at an immigrant gay bar near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, Wildness created a space where the bar’s longtime patrons, queer people of color, mixed with artists and performers. Tsang’s feature film "Wildness" (2012) documents this scene and the perpetual negotiation of race, gender, and socioeconomic class among the patrons, who wrestle with questions of gentrification, authenticity, and ownership as they encounter each other’s realities. The bar itself plays a leading role in the film, serving as an omniscient narrator and embodying the imaginative and performative acts through which cultural fictions are formed and expressed. The artist became widely known in 2012 thanks to this film, which premiered at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight. 

Other films by Tsang include "We hold where study" (2017), "Girl Talk" (2015), "Damelo Todo (Gimme Everything)" (2010), and "Shape of a Right Statement" (2008). 

Wu Tsang’s work has been exhibited or screened at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, Gropius Bau in Berlin, Tate Modern London, Kunsthalle Münster, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among many other national and international venues.

Wu Tsang received a B.F.A. (2004) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.F.A. (2010) from the University of California at Los Angeles. 

Flora Katz is an art critic, independent curator and PHD student at the institute ACTE (Arts, créations, théories et esthétique – CNRS / Université Paris 1).

She studied philosophy (Master II Université Paris 1-Sorbonne) and exhibition curating (Master II Université Paris IV - Sorbonne), and worked at Centre Pompidou, at Bétonsalon - Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, then in New York at Miguel Abreu Galllery. She currently collaborate with DOC to co-run the Free University, and Orange Rouge.