Iris Lingyu Zhang      

The Tent



2024

Experimental video 5’07’’
Sculpture 90*90*90cm


With textile, performance, sound mapping, graphic manipulations, and digital world-building



The Tent is a research-based multimedia artwork, based on the third part of the research thesis Traces: ‘’Free-assemblage making’ as a method to touch self-narrative, that uses autoethnographic methodology. It addresses the struggle of female subjectivity against the ‘Big Other’ in the context of cultural colonialism and sexualisation.


The artist conducted a long-term third-perspective observation of her own dating life, integrating emotions into intimate spaces through poetic graphic narrative. 

Using the method of integration in self-archiving and invoking psychoanalytic theories to parse the textual graphics, the artist attempts to find a connection between the environment and herself, thus removing the sense of dislocation and alienation caused by the dramatic environmental change.



In the process, the self-narrative paradox of hysterical discourse is revealed. The emotional stories symbolised by the structure are built into the in-between world. It actively interprets both the intimate space and the individual, isolating the individual from the environment, but at the same time reconstituting a new way of connecting the individual to the environment.




The tent, as part of the artist's body, becomes a daydream made of the body, but covering it, where the visible and the invisible happen simultaneously, interpreting the situation of the divided female subject. She exists in the city, she disappears in the city. It is grotesque and must be interpreted by others.





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