LIVERPOOL.- Emerging filmmaker, artist and performer Wu Tsang’s new solo show Under Cinema investigates how artistic practice and its products are positioned to challenge dominant narratives.

The world premiere of a new commission film, Under Cinema, features the acclaimed American singer-songwriter Kelela, and was conceived as a site-specific installation for FACT’s Gallery 2, which is located under a cinema venue. The exhibition investigates issues of voice and representation through innovative filmmaking methodologies, questioning the reliability of the fixed image, as well as the viewer’s gaze.

Alongside the new commission is the UK premiere of We hold where we study (2017), a two-channel projected film which takes a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning. The film enacts a series of duets, both within and between images.

Moving fluidly between documentary, activism, and fiction, Tsang’s intimate approach and continuous re-interpretation of the roles of history, language, music, and performance creates an immersive other-worldly context for her characters. Her filmmaking style tends towards the magical realist, and focuses on the increasing importance of imagination in both storytelling and the day-to-day. For Tsang, the relationship between the cinematic and the social is inherently problematic, and her filmmaking becomes a testing ground for collaboration and repeated, perhaps ritualistic, refusals of representation.

Tsang’s new commission is a co-production between FACT and Warp Records, and is developed with the support of the Goethe-Institut, London.

We hold where study was commissioned by curator Nadja Argyropoulou for Polyeco Art Initiative.

Wu Tsang’s films, installations, performances, and sculptures move fluidly between documentary, activism, and fiction. Her projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MCA (Chicago), MOCA (Los Angeles), Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), SANFIC (Santiago), Hot Docs Festival (Toronto), and South by Southwest Film Festival (Austin). Her first feature film WILDNESS (2012) premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in “The Ungovernables” New Museum Triennial in New York. She has received grants from Creative Capital, the Warhol Foundation, and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. Wu Tsang is based between Berlin, Athens and Los Angeles, and is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.