Join us this Digbeth First Friday to check out our two exhibitions – U & I and dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage – and experience one-night-only readings and performances by Amy Ching-Yan Lam, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Sahjan Kooner and Sophie Chapman.
HONEY and BF are pleased to host you this evening in their alternate forms…
We are for a practice of cross contamination. Expanding interconnected constellations of worlds, people making alongside one another, through this moment together. We are a set of mutations, intensifications and extrapolations waiting for you in the near future. Linking time, space, material and place across portals into our moment held together here. This evening is for us, as ectoplasmic hauntings to be thrown back into the light where you stand, our performance is your ritual…
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Visitation order for the evening:
Gary Zhexi Zhang
Video will be playing throughout the evening …
The Tourist (2023)
The Tourist tells the story of Zanzibar, China, and Ali Sultan Issa, a man at the centre of an uneasy marriage between Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism. It explores a shifting geopolitical atmosphere from the cosmopolitan optimism of the “Bandung Spirit” declaration, signed at the first large-scale Afro-Asian Conference in 1955, to the uncertain alignments of today.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer whose work explores connections between cosmology, technology and economy. He was born in Suzhou and works in London. He recently edited a book of fictions, essays and interviews about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). The opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, Dead Cat Bounce, premiered at Somerset House in 2022. His last solo exhibition, Cycle 25, documented events that blur the boundaries between speculative belief and the material world, like natural disasters, scam nations and cosmic economies. Recent group shows include Katabasis, Totalab, Shanghai; Liquid Ground, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe & Para Site, Hong Kong; The Principle of Hope, Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing.
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Sahjan Kooner
Performing throughout the evening inside a cardboard box …
Phantom Terraforming (2023)
Inside a cardboard box, fortunes for a future terraforming arrive, handed to each audience member who elects to receive one. All fortunes written by ClaudeAi
Sahjan Kooner is an amalgamation of inherited worlds and speculative futures, they work in a freelance capacity to support their practice and owe a great deal to their family, they are a student of the dream state. Using video and installation, they create expansive worlds that explore the traces of love, hope and imagination that make our lives possible, along with examining a debris of questions around the technological, social and racialised structures that augment life.
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Amy Ching-Yan Lam
6.30pm reading near the scaffold platform …
Reading from Baby Book (2023)
Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of Looty Goes to Heaven (2022) and her poems have been published by Book Works, Montez Press, and yolkless press. Baby Book is her first collection of poetry. Lam’s exhibitions, performances, and public artworks, both solo and as part of the collective Life of a Craphead, have been presented at Seoul MediaCity Biennale, Eastside Projects, and Art Gallery of Ontario, amongst others, and she has participated in residencies at Macdowell and Delfina Foundation. She lives in Toronto, which is Mississauga Anishinaabeg treaty territory, as well as the land of the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat. Lam was born in Hong Kong.
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Sophie Chapman
7pm performing on the scaffold platform …
Tiger Helix (Oblivion) (2023)
Scrambling around inside a tiger print spandex morphsuit, Sophie Chapman is trying to wrestle (in the dark) with current collective feelings of apocalypse and oblivion – getting in knots in the process. The performance explores morphological processes of transformation, trying to grapple with Western ignorance, queer, contemporary and urban entanglements with nature, and change.
Sophie Chapman is an interdisciplinary artist and organiser based in London. I follow sprawling research connections across science, philosophy, queer and feminist theory, pop culture, music and community organising, to produce experimental performances, films, sculptures, drawings, texts and sounds. Often in collaboration with other people, I make art as a way to learn. Through processes of combining, coagulating and layering our experiences and ideas, to try for a more complex and plural way of being. I run a queer, experimental sharing night called MINCE – get in touch if you’ve stuff to share.
