Gestures towards Exile

HU Wei
1:20 min, 9 videos in total 12 min, loop
Edition of 3
9-Screen Synchronized Video Installation
2024

Gestures towards Exile is a 9-channel video with notes on the sound. The video records a panic attack when overwhelmed by memory and condolence, with histories, distant and modern, hanging over.

The artist gathered most of the videos in the southwestern mountainous area, recording action details and nuanced looks that hold and carry the oral history. Evolved over the labor, shifting cultivation, and domestication of nature and animals in their migratory journey, hand gestures, body position, and rhythm within are the mountaineers’ non-verbal narrative expressions, pointing to a “jellyfish style” escape culture. The artist created a fictional acting group, a storyteller, in the video. They use “texts in the brain” to deliver scenes about migration, mythology, collective identity, and social order. The artist then enhanced the performativity by synthesizing beat drums.

While continuing his focus on escaping outside the “system” and constant attention to the invisible, the artist recently also tries to combine the media language in early experimental film, exploring a routine, subordinate, resistant, and counter-narrative way.