Performance: Object Without Shadow by Sikarnt Skoolisariyaporn

Sat 09 Sep 2017 8PM

Off-site at Chinese War Memorial, Vancouver.

In Object without Shadow, Skoolisariyaporn re-enacts a ritual she practiced with her father’s Chinese-born family each September, the period when it is believed that ghosts are able to make a momentary reappearance from the afterlife. In this custom, paper replicas of desirable objects – such as jewelry, iPhones, computers and majong sets – are presented as offerings to ancestors. Skoolisariyaporn’s performance combines a series of offerings with the reading aloud of texts to consider the myriad ghosts produced under capitalism: from the spectral return of living things, to the invisible labour of historical Chinese immigrants to Vancouver. In this way she conjures a relationship between the North Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as a theatre for both colonialism and neoliberalism.