The Exotic Fruits Lab is a collaboration between Lian Loke and Kristina Mah taking place at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Through a week-long immersion, the artists explore and experiment with image, movement and the body to question identity and transformation. The lab will incubate the development of “Exotic Fruits”, a durational performance taking place at Melaka Arts and Performances Festival in Malaysia, on August 31, 2024.
As Westernised children of South-East Asian migrants, we are caught between worlds. Our parents sought to assimilate into their adopted country, rejecting Asian traditions and superstitions for new found freedoms. Yet we long for deeper connection with our lost cultural heritage, beyond an obsession with the exotic. In this performance we create our own rituals of acceptance and integration, drawing on nostalgic childhood memories of food and festivals. We notice and listen to our embodied narratives and uninitiated understandings of cross-cultural identities, language and meaning.
We question and converse through playful rituals drawing on the absurd as ways to reconnect and converse with our broken lineages, with broken language. Asking ourselves the perplexing question, "Am I a banana or an egg, or something in between?"
Artists
LIAN LOKE is a multi-disciplinary movement artist based on Gadigal land, Warrane/Sydney, Australia. Her practice questions the role of the body in contemporary society, and how our notions of self are open to transformation through inter-cultural, inter-species and inter-media relations and rituals. She trained in somatic and shamanic dance practices, including Bodyweather, Body-Mind Centering and Qigong. Her solo and group dance performances and performance installation work are primarily in non-traditional performance spaces.
KRISTINA MAH is an artist, researcher, and karate-ka living and working on Gadigal-Wangal land (inner west Sydney), Australia. Her work draws inspiration from ancient wisdom traditions and emphasises embodied ways of knowing and lived experience. Her creative art practice involves study of rituals, movement, cosmology, and mystic symbolism that informs tangible, spatial, and sensory experiences and embodied narratives.