Elsewhere

Benny Shaffer

Installation for nine screens, one projection, Harvard Art Museums, 2019

This video installation explores the performing life of a sixth-generation Uyghur tightrope walker from Kashgar, China, as he navigates the margins of a burgeoning entertainment industry. The performance of tightrope walking (dawaz) resonates with the precarity of his wandering life—a balance between deft precision and overwhelming uncertainty. The spectacular and inherently dangerous character of his profession also hints at a broader context in which Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority primarily from northwest China’s Xinjiang Province, are continually subjected to discriminatory policies by the Chinese government, including the recent mass, extralegal detainment of Uyghur citizens in so-called “reeducation camps.” In a site-specific work for the Lightbox Gallery, the installation experiments with the geometric contours of the space, its nine-screen array of monitors in a 3 x 3 grid like a television newsroom or a CCTV surveillance monitor setup, and an additional single-shot performance positioned as if to gaze out from the performer’s perspective through the windows of the towering, vertiginous space.