Studies on Squats: Handouts, 2021
Live performance, 5 hours
Handouts was a durational performance that invited gallery visitors to engage with the performing artists. The artist remained squatting throughout, establishing an unspoken score that visitors had to negotiate; to engage in a proper conversation at eye level, the visitors found themselves squatting as well. Some chose to remain standing while conversing. The handout itself included information on the squatting position and functioned as an icebreaker, opening a more performative dialogue with visitors. Most participants initially spoke about squatting from a place of intellectual or contextual knowledge; after squatting, however, they began to articulate the position through embodied knowledge.
The umbrella project Studies on Squats examines the bodily posture of the squat as a performative archive of cultural, affective, and political data. Using the “Asian squat” as a central mode, the project approaches posture as an embodied information system through which histories of migration, illness, resilience, and collective survival circulate. The project investigates how certain gestures become legible, misread, or rendered invisible within public infrastructures and broader data cultures. Field research, relational movement practices, and choreographic mapping are woven together to reveal the squat as a tactic of care, endurance, humor, and resistance — a posture that unsettles normative expectations around how bodies should appear in public space.
Support and Organization: Torrance Art Museum and NOMAD
Photo Documentation: Daniel Kim