Souvenirs of Frictions: Three films by Peng Zuqiang     

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, October 20 at 7pm for Peng Zuqiang​: Souvenirs of Frictions, featuring a screening of Peng’s keep in touch (2021), Sight Leak (2022), and The Cyan Garden (2022) and followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

Working with associations and coincidences, tracing steps of failed attempts, whether it’s a revolution or assassination, Peng Zuqiang is interested in figures in dislocated time and space, where a subject at times cannot take form. His works often start from memories, souvenirs of the past, which he fictionalizes in order to approach history from a different angle. Focusing on frictions between body and language, Peng’s works propose an alternative regime of visibility in which associative gestures, coincidences, and telling silences become the primary source of meaning.

keep in touch (2021, 14 minutes)
keep in touch is a five-channel video installation, presented in a single channel version for the screening. Emerging from one reel of Super 8 film and a brief prompt given to a group of friends, the work gestures a sense of being together-in-difference that brushes against fleeting, unstable solidarity. Fragmented with moments of silence, uneasy gossip, and coded bodily communication, the work considers the complexity of contact, touch, and becoming a subject.

Sight Leak (2022, 12 minutes)
“The moon, the sometimes dark street, trees, it’s warm […] at last, a certain eroticism possible (that of the warm night).” When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that would become part of his Travels in China (Carnets du voyage en Chine, 2009), an underplot of desire in his imagination of the country. Barthes did not publish these writings during his lifetime, and his unsettling judgments about China are refracted in Peng Zuqiang’s work Sight Leak as fragments of dialogues on class and looking, responding to reflections on the same matters elicited alongside Barthes’s sense of eroticism. The local tourist in the film travels through different spaces and gatherings, seemingly never looking at anyone, yet silently looking at someone, turning towards a certain collectivity in spite of a foreign homoerotic gaze.

The Cyan Garden (2022, 8 minutes)
The Cyan Garden considers the limits of giving form to the past which cannot cohere into memory. In part filmed on Lucky, a discontinued B&W 16mm film reel stock intended for military aerial detection, the moving image revolves around a radio station that was not supposed to be detected and an Airbnb apartment called “The Lover,” run by Peng’s friend in their hometown. Between 1969 and 1981, the Malaysian communist underground radio-in-exile Voice of the Malayan Revolution resided in what is now soon to be a resort. Projected on a holographic screen producing shadowy after-images, the work flickers between radio static, bursts of archival jingles, ruins of the radio station, and choreographed scenes of the Airbnb apartment decorated in imagined “Southeast Asian” style.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

​​For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.