YOKE

VIDEO, 2012

TINA GONSALVES (AU)

In 2011, Tina Gonsalves traveled to western China for a residency. She was intrigued by news reports suggesting that families were hiring professional funeral crying services to cry at their loved ones funerals. Professional mourning is an occupation practiced in some Mediterranean, African, some middle Eastern and Asian cultures, slowly getting lost to the past. Professional mourners are compensated to lament.

During a residency in the west of China, the artist developed relationships with eight professional mourners bringing them into a gallery space. She hired the mourners to cry for her. Dramatically wailing, and tears gathering, they sing and moan with an overwhelming intensity. A primal, dramatic representation of grief is displayed, as the mourners throw themselves to the ground, rip at their hair and body, and scream and break into song.

Grief is a compelling and visceral emotional state that most of us have felt in some time in our lives. Often, when we see another person emoting, we will feel some of that emotion, so we recognise our own sadness. Humans are innately attuned to read nuances of emotion in others, and then judging the appropriateness of the emotion. The artist hopes that visitors become swept up in emotion, but then remembers that this is, in fact, a performance of grief — it is not the real thing. We feel sad, manipulated and empathic in equal measure, an unsettling state that opens the space to question the authenticity of emotion and its role in our lives.

BIO:

Tina’s latest text-based interventions developed with Nokia Research Center in Finland use social networking technology to disrupt habitual communication. She has been awarded numerous Artist in Residence programmes including many residencies and co-productions with the Banff New Media Institute in Canada from 2002 to 2008; the Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Asialink Residency in Bangkok in 2004 and Beijing in 2012; (Pro)duction residency at ArtSway in 2005, UK; the Advanced Institute of Media Arts and Sciences residency in Japan in 2005 and Arts Council England’s International Fellowship based in London in 2006. She is honorary artist-in-residence at the Institute of Neurology at University College London, visiting artist at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA, artist-in-residence at Nokia Research Center in Finland as well as the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Her work has been awarded by a Wellcome Trust Large Art Award, Synapse Art Award, many Australia Council grants, UK Arts Council Grants, Arts Queensland, Asialink, Australian Network for Art and Technology and Creative Connections award. Her latest work Chameleon is a collaboration with neuroscientists, technologists, curators and international research departments (including the MIT Media Lab and the Wellcome Department of Neuroimaging) exploring emotional contagion, that is currently touring internationally.

tinagonsalves.com