Text by Charlie Clark
The recent eclipse experienced by many in North America stands as a testament to the timeless wonder we feel at these kinds of cosmic events. Images and stories about eclipses inundated the internet, and I was caught up in all that information… its mythic connections and associated historical beliefs. Recurrent themes in contemporary emerging art are building off past histories and ritual practices, delving into this fascination with the mythic and the ancient. I am so excited by the (cynically so-called) “trend” towards ritual performance inspired by historic rites.
If well done, such work has a timeless quality that seems to speak to the canon of art history and, more broadly, how humans have sought to connect to that which sits outside of themselves. These themes are celebrated through platforms like Ignota, Future Ritual and OHSH Projects. Each of them respectively presents a highly curated series of events around the symbol of the spiral, rebirth, and ancient mythology in recent months.
London-based performance initiative Future Ritual platforms and promotes performance art that draws on myth-making and ritual practices. Led by seminal performance artist Joseph Morgan Schofield, since 2021, their events have involved artists’ fleshy, bodily transformations with tangible elements of blood, stone and water. OHSH Projects, also conceived in 2021 by Henry Hussey and Sophie Olver, centres ancient mythology, history and symbolism in their shows. Artists Becky Tucker and Dale Adcock have shown work there, as well as Suzanne Treister, the authoritative artist on alternative belief systems.
Amongst the myriad of soulful and artistic investigations into ancient belief systems and rituals is the work and research of London-based curator Anastasia Chugunova. Her recently curated event, Sonic Flows, took place at Pushkin House and drew together the history of information and communication technologies and concepts of transcendence through three performances.
A binary between the technological and the mythic was visible in the works of the performing artists, whose works put the digital and the ancient side by side, with different results conjured in each case. Building on her event series, Fluid Cosmologies, co-curated with Samy Bie at Forma last, which involved ethereal performances falling on successive fall moons in August, Chugunova focused her research on the transmission of meaning and experience for this more recent event.
Working with artists Yiwen Li and Samuel Barbier-Ficat and the collective Lao San Yang, the performances fused techno with the classical and the spiritual. Yiwen Li’s group choreography held elements of classical Chinese dance together with the jerkier, beat-driven movements you’d likely see at UNFOLD on a Sunday.
Barbier-Ficat’s sound piece melded digital sound production with classical instruments, resulting in an uncanny piece where differences between the two were near impossible to define. Lao San Yang (Bianco Li, Corey Lu, and Zhuyang Liu) used hexagrams as springboards for improvised sound work. Each performance was caught in between the scientific and the mythic, as though seeking the enchantment in what Max Weber aptly called the disenchantment of the world in an era of modernity. Turning to the past for inspiration, the artists used ancient methods of divination, centuries-old drawings of the Mogao caves, and Hildegard von Bingen’s music compositions as conceptual touchstones for the works.
Li’s Cavernous Whisper drew on the centuries-old Mogao cave drawings as inspirations for the shapes and forms of the dancers. Also inspired by Taoist and Buddhist myths, Li’s research focused on how the spirit leads the body to create shapes in movement. The spirit leads, and the body follows. Samuel Barbier-Ficat has a background in classical music but was drawn to digital sound production when he realised he could make the same sounds this way but with more room to experiment. Drawing on this uncanny valley, the artist was inspired by the discordant harmonies of an orchestra tuning their instruments before a performance. This concept filled his sound works with tension.
Lao San Yang activated their performance through the ancient divination method of reading hexagrams. This process generated a score that formed the basis of the primarily improvised piece. Echoing Barbier-Ficat’s play between the digital and the acoustic, the collective worked with both sounds, using the historic guzheng to produce the acoustic sounds, an instrument whose music is synonymous with Chinese folk music.
I look forward to seeing where Chugunova’s investigations into mysticism and the contemporary will lead next. If the prominence of myth and mysticism in the currents of emerging art in London is anything to go by, it feels like an exciting time to explore these timeless themes.
