Rooted in the tropical underground of Los Angeles nightlife, Wildness is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic bar that has been home to Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963. With a magical-realist flourish the bar itself becomes a character, narrating what happens when a weekly party...
Conceived as a performance for the camera, Girl Talk captures poet and theorist Fred Moten in a verdant garden donning an ornate velvet cape and crystal jewelry: what is generally coded as decidedly feminine attire. His body spins slowly, filling the frame with mesmerizing continuous motion....
Inspired by the untold personal story of the 19th-century Chinese poet and revolutionary Qiu Jin, Wu Tsang brings to life, subverts, and re-enacts the lesser-known romance and friendship with calligrapher Wu Zhiying. Set in contemporary Hong Kong, the film shifts between time and space, past and...
This two-channel film, initiated as a long-distance communication experiment, was the result of an exchange with Fred Moten, the poet and theorist whose work explores representation and identity in black avant-garde culture. Moten and Tsang left each other voicemail messages every day over a...
Set on the northeastern shore of Lesbos, Greece, the work revolves around a scenario in which two women cross paths three years ago – although they never met.
Andrea, a grieving Chicana mother, confronts an uninvited family member before her Día de los Muertos celebration. By night's end, death offers her a choice that she couldn't make in life.
Wu Tsang’s immersive film Of Whales forms part of her movie trilogy inspired by Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. Of Whales offers a poetic meditation on the perspective of a sperm whale, who plunges to the depths of the ocean for an hour at a time, surfacing occasionally for a breath...
We hold where study takes a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning. The film enacts a series of duets, both within and between images, featuring choreography by boychild with Josh Johnson and by Ligia Lewis with Jonathan Gonzalez, both to original music by Bendik Giske. The work is...
La gran mentira de la muerte (The big lie of death) is a multichannel sound and film installation conceived as a site-specific work for MACBA’s Capella. It explores poetic themes of Carmen, particularly as her myth is entangled with the performative fields of flamenco and bullfighting. Like the...
"Into a Space of Love", the first of a four-part film project in partnership with Frieze Magazine. Directed by Wu Tsang, the realist documentary explores the legacies of house music rooted in New York underground culture.
In this video, Tsang explores language as an instrument of power. She re-speaks a text from In My Language, a video posted to YouTube in 2007 by autism activist and blogger Amanda Baggs, in which, using a speech-generation device, Baggs describes her experience as an individual who communicates...
Mishima in Mexico draws inspiration from Yukio Mishima’s novel Thirst for Love and from Mishima’s legacy as it is encountered today within a global queer context. The original novel is a twisted romance set in 1950s post-war Japan. Etsuko, a widowed society woman falls in love with her servant...
Salomania reconstructs a dance: the ‘dance of the seven veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé. Also shown and rehearsed are sections from ‘Valda’s Solo,’ which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created after having seen Nazimova’s film.
