Exhibition
Chapter 2: Crossings
Living, Rehearsing...
Free admission Sold out Performance 12–6pm, 7 Feb Display on view 10–25 Feb
In place of the simultaneous performances that made up Soundings, the first chapter of Living, Rehearsing…, the second chapter, Crossings, embodies a state of perpetual movement—a flow between meaning, space and temporalities shaped by diasporic experiences.
Activated from midday into the evening, YDP's building becomes a single, continuous timeline, like a long single-take film. In this rehearsal of passage, transition and navigation, each performer explores the building’s physical and symbolic parameters, testing the thresholds that demarcate a shared sense of time and space. The end of one performance in turn morphs into the beginning of the next, cross-fading as weight, rhythm and intentions are handed over.
The performers guide visitors through the building, as small actions gather momentum over six hours: the subtle gestures of motorised devices greet visitors; rhythmic knocks on the wall are intercepted by footsteps of a dance up the spiral staircase; and a tongue wrestles with a foreign image, as flickering smoke finds form on a canvas in the courtyard. During moments of rest, food serves as an extension of performance, storytelling, and nourishment. Like gentle ghosts, performers and visitors drift through the building together, inhabiting a space between the accidental, the improvised and the contingent, where energies and meanings start to ferment and swirl. Variation 1 | 12:00–13:30 Performances in order of appearance: Swilipino, Rie Nakajima, Woody Kwong, KIMVI
Variation 2 | 13:30–15:00 Performances in order of appearance: Swilipino, Osamu Shikichi, Woody Kwong, KIMVI
Variation 3 | 15:00–16:30 Performances in order of appearance: Rie Nakajima, Swilipino, Woody Kwong, Abbas Zahedi with Dave Meckin
Variation 4 | 16:30–18:00 Performances in order of appearance: Swilipino, Osamu Shikichi, Abbas Zahedi with Dave Meckin, Woody Kwong, KIMVI
Upcoming
Chapter 3: Reverberance on 28 February Lineup and booking to be announced soon.
Performance programme
KIMVI
Smoke as Facade, Liminality and Threshold is a ritual of impermanence. Using fumage – a surrealist technique where subtle impressions created by smoke trace a surface – the artist collaborates with wind and winter light to produce a fragile image. These ephemeral patterns dissolve as they appear, turning the YDP courtyard into a liminal state. KIMVI’S performance stages a dialogue between human intention and the beauty of natural randomness, offering a poetic acceptance of meaning found in evanescence rather than permanence.
Woody Kwong
Kwong creates an improvised flow across the building, transforming its liminal spaces into a vibrant tapestry of movement. Taking spiral staircases and other transitory zones as focal points, Kwong’s improvisation echoes and synchronises with the architecture, inviting the audience into an immersive live performance. As he weaves through hallways, rooms, open areas and remnants from Chapter 1, his performance becomes a living bridge, threading together other past and present performances from the evolving programme of Living, Rehearsing….
Rie Nakajima
‘Memories will eventually fade and disappear, no matter how hard we try. Yet even at this very moment, there are countless things that remain in our minds – some we want to forget, and some we want to remember forever. In this way, we are passive to our memories. I am passive to my sound.’ Rie Nakajima
Nakajima will activate an array of kinetic devices and found objects in response to the architecture of YDP. Often traversing the border of sculpture and music, an accumulation of improvised experiments will slowly spread out on the floor as she gathers, picks and moves with them freely.
Osamu Shikichi
ur phantom eyes, our crystallized pains (2020–) is an ongoing dance performance building on Shikichi’s choreographic practice over the years. Playing withWET (Weird Erotic Tension) images or images of pain—such as a crucified body or the treatment of phantom limbs—the performance builds plural concepts of the body. Using their tongue to create and lick images, Shikichi imagines it as a screen and a third hand, praying and speaking to a new political eye which they cast on the human body. In doing so, the performance introduces doubts about our ideas of human bodies, remixing and hacking systems that determine what a body is in relation to the gaze.
Swilipino
In between each Variation, Swilipino offers a shared moment by serving food to both performers and audience members. Inspired by the mobile food culture found throughout Asia, its roadside snacks and food stalls, Swilipino creates her own take on these genres, delivering a series of snacks and drinks that will sustain participants and viewers throughout the journey of Crossings.
Abbas Zahedi with Dave Meckin
Tapping Performance is a live, site-responsive sound work that maps the gallery’s physical and non-physical properties across time and space. Working through touch, contact, vibration and resonance, the performance is assisted by Zahedi’s long-term collaborator, sound designer Dave Meckin, who will contribute live sound capture, processing and transmission. For Crossings, Abbas ‘wiretaps’ rooms 3 and 4, creating a sonically activated field where performers and audiences can experiment with sound and touch throughout the event.
Header image: Rie Nakajima. Photography by Tiu Makkonen. Image courtesy of Rie Nakajima.
About the Artist
KIMVI (b. 1982, Bangor) is a British Vietnamese visual and performance artist whose multidisciplinary practice navigates the fluid intersections of the body, cultural memory and the built environment. Based in Fujian, China, her work is a critical and poetic exploration of how we inhabit and internalise space. Her public artworks are permanently installed at the Xi · Art Museum and BFM Art Centre in China. She has performed at Art Central Hong Kong, and her film performances received an award at the Architecture & Design Film Festival (Canada) as well as a screening in New Zealand as part of the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival.
Woody Kwong (b. 1997, Hong Kong) is a dance artist based in Hong Kong who works across dance performance, improvisation and choreography. He is one of the co-directors of Hong Kong’s renowned dance crew ChestRoll. With training in choreography, house and hip-hop, Kwong’s all-styles practice experiments with how music and lifestyle alter movement, using the synchronised body as a storytelling tool across live performance, music video, experimental theatre, dance film and social media.
Dave Meckin is a sound designer/artist and researcher with a PhD in media and arts technology from Queen Mary University of London. He has collaborated with studios and artists including United Visual Artists (UVA), Lisa Chang Lee, Abbas Zahedi and Jiayu Liu. His practice focuses on generative and responsive soundscapes for large-scale installations, exhibited internationally at venues including Tate Modern, 180 Studios, Taikang Art Museum, and Shenzhen Bay Sea World Culture and Arts Center. His research explores novel instrument design with and for disabled musicians, working closely with Drake Music. He is a tutor (research) on the Information Experience Design MA at the Royal College of Art.
Rie Nakajima (b. 1976, Yokohama) is a sculptor living in London. She creates sounds using motorised devices and everyday objects in the context of installations and performances. Her art exists on the borderline of sculpture and music, open to improvisation, chance and the influence of others. Solo exhibitions include IKON Gallery (Birmingham) and she has also worked with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Association Le Cyclop (Milly la Forêt), Donaueschinger Music Festival (Donaueschinger) and Cafe OTO in London, among many others. Frequent collaborators include Pierre Berthet, Angharad Davies, David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Max Eastley, Miki Yui, Hans W. Koch, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop and Akira Sakata.
Osamu Shikichi (b. 1994, Saitama) is a choreographer and dancer based in Tokyo and Brussels. Their practice questions the human body as something often taken for granted, challenging notions of bodily self-possession and identity. Shikichi explores the idea of the anonymous body through performance, video and mediated sculptures, blurring and remixing how bodies are recognised, gazed upon and politicised. Drawing on personal experiences of dissonance between body and mind, their work focuses on WET (Weird Erotic Tension) movements, ASMR-like sensations and the circulation of affects across human and non-human bodies.
Swilipino is a creative identity and food project initiated in 2018 by Tintin Jonsson, a photographer-turned-chef seeking a new creative outlet and a deeper connection to her dual heritage. Through her Swedish-Filipino lens, Jonsson cooks Filipino-inspired dishes that reflect both personal memory and cultural exploration. Drawing from the rich, multicultural foodways of Mindanao, where her mother is from, Jonsson blends traditional Filipino flavours with touches of Swedish nostalgia, creating what she playfully refers to as ‘Frankenfood’, food that sits joyfully between worlds.
Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London) is an artist working at the intersections of sonic and sculptural forms, exploring systems of care, thresholds of experience and the social architectures of our time. His practice has been described as a form of dissociative realism, moving between intimacy and estrangement and attuned to forms of meaning that sit beyond the purely material. A former medic with training in psychiatry, Zahedi holds an MA in contemporary photography and philosophy from Central Saint Martins. Recent awards include the Stanley Picker Fellowship (2024), Artangel: Making Time (2023), Frieze Artist Award (2022), Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2021) and the Khadija Saye Memorial Scholarship (2017).
