Transmission 5th October JJ Chan

TRANSMISSION
Fine Art lecture series
2021
Semester 1
Transmission is the passing of information via a channel, and this is the
intention of the Transmission project, started in 2001. We enquire about
the aesthetic and discursive forms required by practices in the field of
contemporary art and theory that address sociality and subjectivity.
Rooks, notoriously gregarious birds, nest communally at night in
the tops of trees. During the day they can be seen to congregate
in fields, arranging themselves in a circle they listen in turn to one
another’s calls. The collective noun humans use to describe this
activity is a parliament.
In an essay in Artforum, published in May 2020, entitled ‘Learning from the Virus’, Paul B. Preciado argues that care comes from a process of political transformation. He says that the closing of community (as experienced under confinement) must be challenged, if we are to stay alive. The matter is one of recollectivisation, beyond the sovereignty of identity and border politics.
He speaks (again) of ‘a parliament of (vulnerable) bodies living on planet Earth’. Parliament of Bodies was originally conceived as the public programme of dOCUMENTA 14, arising from the need for a counter-parliament of living bodies after the OXI vote of Greek citizens in 2016. This developed into the Bergen Assembly’s various ‘assemblies’, commending somatic dissonance and
transfeminist critique, and into other manifestations, such as an open session in the Department of Presence programme, in the context of the then current situation in Poland.
From this, Transmission takes its title and its theme: parliament, but one that is a counter-parliament in which all may speak, in which bodies are implicated and recognised as subjects: humans, non-human, objects, arrangements; fictional and physical, flesh and spirit; the building of alliances and ‘the exercise of liberty and the celebration of struggle’, as Kryzsztof Kosciuczuk writes.

This week’s Transmission was introduced by Michelle Atherton who researches particular moments conditions in collective histories. Her remix aesthetic, incorporating sound, image, text, and lighting effects, produces fragmented
narratives. Her images are hooks to explore slippery perceptions of the world, looking again where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics, and new imaginaries. She is currently researching the arts of transience through the new audio work Live from the Rowan Tree and International Space Station for Borrowed Time Symposium 2021, and developing a residence with Phytology, London. Michelle introduced JJ Chan:

JJ CHAN https://www.jjchan.co.uk/
JJ Chan works across and amid sculpture, moving image, and writing, drawing from lived experience and stories stolen from eavesdropped conversations, exploring the edges of everyday realities and how we construct our identities. Through storytelling and world-building, their work (re)searches for an alternative space beyond aggressively progressive capitalist time, seeking new worlds from the ashes of the present. JJ Chan’s works have been presented at galleries, film festivals, nightclubs, house parties and academic conferences. Their writing has
been published in glossy magazines, illicit newsletters, academic journals, and artist publications. Previous projects have been in partnership with neighbours, friends, colleagues and students across differing but mutually implicating social contexts. Currently Blueprints for the Otherwise artist in residence at Bloc Projects, JJ Chan presented a series of rhetorical questions, notes from practice, and ideas from eavesdropped conversations, addressing the practice of filibustering.
A filibuster is a tactical approach to debate that delays or entirely prevents
a decision being made on a given proposal, usually so that policy remains unchanged. Chan considered how our work as artists might be confronted and affected by such practice, what forms it might take and how, or if as artists we might affect change by shape-shifting, mimicking, subverting, and restaging the filibuster through rhetorical (and not so rhetorical) questions. The talk revolved around two short films made in 2019, before the outbreak of Covid-19, revisiting concerns of racism, capitalism, surveillance, and the urgency of the arts as we
re-emerge from lockdown, asking to what kind of normalities we might hope to return.

Yuen Fong Ling was recipient of Site Gallery’s Platform 2018–20 artist development programme; part of the ‘Making Our Way’ strategic planning for the visual arts led by Sheffield Culture Consortium, and recently appointed a commissioner for the Race Equality Commission supported by Sheffield City Council focussing on decolonising street names, statues and monuments in Sheffield. Ling’s recent project Towards Memorial (2018-ongoing) explores the making, gifting and wearing of sandals once designed and made by gay socialist activist writer Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) as an alternative form of public memorial-making.
Yuen is a good friend of JJ Chan’s and talked about Yuen being born in Doncaster and working in London and also for his admiration for JJ Chan calling out an art institution describing JJ Chan as an activist and a legend. https://www.jjchan.co.uk/cfcca This is the link to that open letter.

J J Chan’s Instagram also sheds a lot of light on their process and mindset I would recommend wholeheartedly to look through. https://www.instagram.com/jjchan.co.uk/

One of the videos JJ Chan showed was Birdwatching which is described on JJ Chan’s Instagram as: ” a 10 minute film which follows a convoluted and confused reflection, retold in various Chinese and English dialects formed from found footage and moments of record television. Through three short verses, multiple narratives of technological advancement, freedom, ambition, migration, and experiences of diaspora emerge from the juxtaposition of recognizable voices and accents lifted from their original contexts. Reflecting on systems of power within both personal and global contexts JJ attempts to locate themselves in the world. The film eventually converges on a community of parakeets in Danson Park in South East London overlaid with soundbites referring to coexistence.”

I cannot find this video but the other video is on JJ Chan’s main site entitled: Unbecoming boy: becoming Taylor Swift (2019). You can watch it in its entirety here: https://www.jjchan.co.uk/unbecoming-boy

JJ Chan also posited the question What does a parliament do and to whom. JJ Chan also reading an excerpt from Karan Brand “Meeting the universe halfway.”
There were also references to Sharon Posts, Latour, Rancierre, Braidotti, Vinciane Desprets on articulation.
Links to Cathy Park Hong’s Minor feelings https://profilebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/wpallimport/files/PDFs/9781782837244_preview.pdf and The Undercommons https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf

Conclusion: I found JJ Chan to be an interesting, articulate and thoughtful orator with clear, concise ideas.
I loved the idea of the fact that JJ Chan’s talent in using and understanding art jargon and representing those who are marginalised and may not know how to express themselves against the institutions that use such language to contain people. In the context of a filibuster it is language that can delay because dialogue isn’t brought forward to propel that change within an institution or policy.