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Adrien Sun Hall

Pacific Theatre (Act II)

May 1, 2021
–May 31, 2021

Adrien Sun Hall, Pacific Theatre (Act II), 2018. HD video, colour, sound, 10′58″.

Adapted from a multi-staged installation, Pacific Theatre (Act II) draws connections between wartime and migratory histories of Sino-American relations and the legacy of Asian representations on Western stage and screen. Against a chroma key green backdrop, two performers are masked in chroma key suits. They interact with various props including an empty chinoiserie-style folding screen and camouflage-patterned textiles developed for use in the pacific theatre landscapes of WWII and the Vietnam War. In this second act of three, the unkeyed screen becomes an expansive landscape for self-discovery and embodiment. Presented for the first time online at a moment of renewed yellow peril against the backdrop of a global pandemic, Hall asks how spaces for self-discovery can be created to counter superimposed narratives and representations.

Adrien Sun Hall (born 1990; lives in Toronto) works through sculpture, performance, and time-based media to explore concepts of transience and subjecthood across spaces of gender, landscape, and language. Hall holds a BLA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Guelph and an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Hall has exhibited and performed at Vox Populi, Fjord Gallery, and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, and David Nolan Gallery in New York. Hall was a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center and co-curator of A/PUBLIC: an exhibition and gathering for queer Asian publics at the Kelly Writers House.

Performers: Connie Yu and Adrien Sun Hall

Past Shift Key Programmes

A still from Cecilia Vicuña "Paracas" (1983)
Cecilia Vicuña
Paracas
A Still from Cauleen Smith "Pilgrim" (2017)
Cauleen Smith
Pilgrim
Mona Hatoum
Roadworks
Aura Satz
Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road)