Portfolio

Uro - In this durational performance, the artist interacts with clay and water on her body and canvas. The weight of the clay becomes a force that she works with and against over the six hours of the performance. Sitting on the body as a weighty, damp material, it becomes a solid foundation and morphs the body.

A SPILL Commission at SPILL Festival 2018. Photo: Guido Mencari. https://exeuntmagazine.com/features/spill-festival-2018/

Here I am, I have nothing but my body and my masks; I move with my history; my body and my masks are my tool of expression. Hair in African culture is about power: it is a canvas that is used to display your position in your social setting. Not just a material
to protect your head from the sun or the cold, it is a tool; an object to display rejection or conformation. Growing up in a village in Nigeria, having no hair marked Vivian’s position as a female. Additionally, when her mother was dying of cancer, hair was the first bodily factor to depict the deterioration of her
body. It was the turning point in the way Vivian saw hair and the value that we place upon it as a marker of our identity. ‘Because of Hair; the dichotomy of culture and identity’ explores hair as a subject and an object of concealment. Using masks and movement to create a disturbance, it challenges the notion of
the black body, the black female. https://issuu.com/vivianchinasaezugha/docs/because_of_hair_aw

Maasai more than man more than color’… I am aware of the history of our bodies. We dominate the history of conquest, the presence of human hunger for justification and in turn the revelation of evil doings. So to speak as I write an officer of the law will take a life of another. Though justified by a system of evil and praised by spirits of nothingness. The more than is an extension of our tenacity and permeation. The more than is the acceptance of our strength, the joy in our pain. Within the formation of man lies a map of nature. We stand tall to be seen and jump high to reach.' Photo: Rosie Bowers. https://youtu.be/3p5E5z2i1Uw?feature=shared

In an attempt to understand the power of language and the muscularity of speech. I started to explore the essence of articulation and the relationship between movement and sound. 

The Dancing Tongue’ explores the relationship between this very essence. In a simple way, this is a film that shows the mouth open and the movement of the tongue as I attempt to speak in tongues; that is the movement of glossolalia from the tongue's perspective. 

Creating an impossible performance, this work is an extension of my research which seeks to examine the relevance of glossolalia in performance practice. 

The relevance of this impossible performance is apparent in our social and political operations today; we are locked in our homes, locked in our existence and controlled by factors that are uncontrollable by any human reasoning. Much like glossolalia, a force that lives as a spiritual essence and spoken into a world of physicality and product. This is a new reality and a new existence through articulation. In this movement becomes a bridge to existence. An enabler; movement allows for the visuality of noise- sound- the living force that can not be controlled but is a product of life. 

The impossibility of this performance is then an imaginative task between the work and its observer. In this, the viewer is asked through the reckoning of visualizing such work to imagine what sound is being made and how it is experienced by the simple act of looking at the tongue as it moves up, down, side to side. Commissioned by Impossible Performance https://www.impossibleperformances.org/chinasa-vivian-ezugha