“Everything is Art. Everything is Politics”

Ai Wei Wei

Weaving together lecture, video, and live performance, this presentation showcases my research as an artist, scholar and an activist working across several historical and aesthetic frameworks. We inhabit a complex, tumultuous world in which art-making both illuminates and potentially constitutes social change and justice. Choreography and scholarly research are deeply intertwined in my work. My work draws on elements from Indian dance cultures, postmodern dance, and contemporary critical cultural discourse.  All my choreographic works are located in an international geo-political context; they are an extension of who I am as a global, contemporary dance artist. Creating socially-conscious choreographies charged with political texture represents my artistic response to conservative anxieties around aesthetics, race, sexuality and sexual orientation, nationalism, post-colonialism, immigrant experiences, and diasporic cultural identities. My works resonate with – and in one way or another reflect – this cluster of ideas. I attempt to instill a strong sense of agency in the dancing subject in all my work through a layered, hybrid rhythmicity, queer humour, and irreverent imagery. This audio-visual presentation of my recent choreography illustrates some of my work that is not only densely saturated by the political, but also fundamentally provokes, disturbs, and “messes-up” formalistic conventions and presentational styles of art. It explores the ways in which, as a subjective sensory and intellectual experience, artmaking is a path that culminates in both self-knowledge and social transformation.

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  Hari Krishnan

  USA / Canada