LADA Screens: Tehching Hsieh

Thursday 30 November, 7pm
The Garrett Centre, Bethnal Green
Outside Again – a film about the work of Tehching Hsieh
Directed and edited by Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning
Online from 30 November – January 2018

Following the exhibition Doing Time at the Taiwan Pavilion as part of the 2017 Venice Biennale, LADA Screens presents Outside Again – a film about the work of Tehching Hsieh.

We are thrilled to announce that Hsieh will be joining us for this event where he will present a short talk on the topic of ‘wasting time’. He will also be joined by the curator of Doing Time, Adrian Heathfield and the filmmaker Hugo Glendinning.

Lois Keidan and Tehching Hsieh talk at Tate Exchange
Saturday 2 December 2017, 4pm 
This talk coincides with the installation at Tate Modern of Hsieh's seminal work One Year Performance 1980-81, in which he recorded himself punching a time clock every hour for a year.

Ash Dilks has written a blog on the life and work of Tehching Hsieh, which is available to read here.

About the Film

Outside Again is a short documentary on Tehching Hsieh’s performances, made by photographer Hugo Glendinning with writer and curator Adrian Heathfield, shot in Taipei and New York.

Returning to the original sites of his performances many decades later, Hsieh momentarily relives their sense. Some locations have transformed beyond recognition, some have remained relatively unchanged, and others have fallen into dereliction. The occasion of these returns prompts Hsieh to articulate his thoughts on art and its outsides, long durations, and the testing of human limits.

Directed and edited by Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning.

Commissioned by Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan for Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2017, Venice.

Biographies

Tehching Hsieh was born on December 31st 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan. Hsieh dropped out from high school in 1967 and took up painting. After finishing his army service (1970-1973), Hsieh had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau in Taiwan. Shortly after this solo show, Hsieh stopped painting. He made a performance action, Jump, in which he broke both of his ankles. He trained as a seaman, which he then used as a means to enter the United States. In July of 1974, Hsieh finally arrived at a small port near Philadelphia. He was an illegal immigrant in the States for fourteen years until he was granted amnesty in 1988. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One Year Performances and a ‘Thirteen Year Plan’, inside and outside his studio in New York City. Using long durations, making art and life simultaneous, Hsieh achieved one of the most radical approaches in contemporary art. The first four One Year Performances made Hsieh a regular name in the art scene in New York; the last two pieces, intentionally retreating from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. Since the millennium, released from the restriction of not showing his works during a thirteen-year period, Hsieh has exhibited his work in North and South America, Asia and Europe. Hsieh lives in Brooklyn and is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery.

Adrian Heathfield is a writer and curator. He co-curated Live Culture (Tate Modern 2003) and the creative research project Performance Matters (2009-2014). He was a curatorial attaché for the Sydney Biennale (2016) and, as part of the freethought collective, was a co-director of the Bergen Assembly (2016). He has published extensively on contemporary performance, art, theatre and dance. He is the author of Out of Now a monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh, co-editor of Perform, Repeat, Record and editor of Live: Art and Performance. His writings have been translated into eight languages. He has worked with many artists and thinkers on critical and creative collaborations including film dialogues and performance lectures. Heathfield is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London.

Hugo Glendinning is an internationally renowned photographer whose work spans collaborations with visual artists on photographic and video pieces, theatre, dance and performance documentation, and portraits of prominent figures in society. Over the last thirty years he has published and exhibited work internationally, including works for artists such as Paola Pivi, Yinka Shonibare, Martin Creed and Matthew Barney and most notably his longstanding documentation and investigation of performance photography with Forced Entertainment.

About LADA Screens

LADA Screens is a series of free, online screenings of seminal performance documentation, works to camera, short films/video and archival footage. It is part of Live Online, LADA’s dedicated space where you can watch short videos and films drawn from LADA’s Study Room or generated through our programmes and initiatives.

Each screening will be available to view for a limited time only, and will be launched with a live event at our space in Bethnal Green, London. Online art magazine, thisistomorrow will also feature the films on their website for the duration of the screenings.

LADA Screens is curated by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). LADA is a 'Centre for Live Art': a knowledge centre, a production centre for programmes and publications, a research centre setting artists and ideas in motion, and an online centre for digital experimentation, representation and dissemination.

For more information about LADA Screens please contact Alex Eisenberg.