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Part 1 of Near Dwellers:
Near Dwellers and the Sharing of Breath Sarah Le Quang Sang / SLQS August 4 – September 30, 2023 Extended to October 7, 2023 Reception: September 23, 2023 1-4 pm Eastern Standard Time 10am-1pm Pacific 6-9pm BST Online Discussion with the artist and Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp September 9, 2023 1-3 pm EST 10am-1pm Pacific 6-8pm BST SLQS and scholar Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp will speak about how their work rethinks animal-human relationships through the lens of performance art. (Further details below/right.) Find out more about SLQS by following them on Instagram @SLQSstudio or visiting SLQSstudio.com Please email us with any enquiries, for purchasing information, and to visit by appointment, including virtual visits. |
Sarah Le Quang Sang, aka SLQS, and her film, Walking Together, opens Near Dwellers, our year-long inquiry on human and animal relationships. Her film provocatively and poetically situates us in the midst of a walk with rider and horse as they move through the interstitially urban lands of Walthamstow Marshes, in London, United Kingdom. However, this walk is not a performance of equestrian mastery over one of the most iconic animals in human culture. Instead, SLQS draws us into a meditation on the very essence of our connection to other beings. The simple, but often missed, act of breathing together is presented as a kind of prayer of sorts, not only to the Marshes as host and provider, but also to the very possibility of her and horse’s ability to traverse the Earth – breathing together, listening together, moving together in unison. SLQS immerses us in this intimate communion through her utterance of a mantra:
Breathing in: We are walking together this Earth; Breathing out: This Earth that holds us; In: Walking together; Out: The Earth that holds us… SLQS poignantly reminds us of our place on Earth with its teeming multitude of life forms, and the plain reality of our shared journey: that we share the air as it invisibly loops in and out of all bodies, repeating with every heartbeat. 
Film still: Walking Together
But the film also raises questions that go unanswered: We are directed to watch horse and rider from an aerial perspective and made to inhabit that imperial gaze as they traverse the section of land that we come to see as a map: a patchwork of fields, cut through with train tracks, power lines, well-trodden pathways hemmed in by industrial buildings, roadways and urban settlements. The Marshes are scarred with the markers of human management and control, of human-animal hierarchies and the surveilled body, and like a specter, the unspoken politics of England’s horse culture – its wealth and privilege – lurks as we listen and watch. SLQS’s film draws us into a contemplation on how a relationship with an animal can, at one and the same time, help us appreciate our shared existence with other beings, while also remaining entangled in the social and political burdens of our time.
Walking Together is created by SLQS in collaboration with Bilal Singh and Spirit of Saigon. SLQS is a Franco-Vietnamese artist living in East London. Her practice researches the politics of space and who is excluded from it. SLQS makes and holds space as a woman, a person of mixed heritage, a foreigner, a mother, an artist and an equestrian. She invites her audience to decolonise spatial orders from imperialist, sexist and racist structures.
Her practice is multi-disciplinary spanning from performance, live art, photography, video and screen printing. She also works as producer, curator and workshop leader. SLQS graduated with distinction from MA Performance Making at Goldsmiths University of London. She presented work at MOMA Machynlleth, Totally Thames, Spitalfields Music, Rich Mix, Procreate Project, the Live Art Development Agency, the Royal College of Art, the Brunel Museum, the Migration Museum, the Attenborough Art Centre, the Science Gallery and the University of Lincoln. She is currently a member of the New Artist Collective and Creative Think Tank at UK New Artists. @SLQSstudio / SLQSstudio.com Exhibition Guide
Reading ListInformed by SLQS' body of work Roan/m, recently shown in a solo exhibition at MOMA Machynlleth.
A selection of these books and articles are available for reading at Street Road throughout the year-long Near Dwellers project. D’un cheval l’autre, Bartabas, published by Gallimard 2020 Mediter en marchant, Anh-Huong Nguyen and Thich Nhat Hanh, published by Marabout 2013 Hachette Livre The miracle of mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh, published by Rider 1975 About Looking, John Berger, published for Bloomsbury 1980 WANDERING: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, Sarah Jane Cervenak, published by Duke University Press 2014 A field guide to getting lost, Rebecca Solnit, published by Canongate Books 2017 The spell of the sensuous, David Abram, published by Vintage Books 2017 Animal Acts: performing species today, edited by Una Chaudhuri & Holly Hughes, The University of Michigan 2014 The book of Trespass, Nick Hayes, Bloomsbury 2020 Book chapters/journal articles:
Near Dwellers and the Sharing of Breath
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Part 1
Near Dwellers and the Sharing of Breath Sarah Le Quang Sang with Spirit of Saigon August 4 – September 30, 2023 Part 2 Near Dwellers as Legal Beings Fawn Daphne Plessner Susanna Kamon October 13 – December 30, 2023 Part 3 Near Dwellers as Creative Collaborators Julie Andreyev Ruth K. Burke February 2 – April 13, 2024 |
Part 4
Near Dwellers as Urbanites Jesse Garbe Doug La Fortune May 3 – extended through September 28, 2024 Part 5 – upcoming, dates TBA Near Dwellers Forest The Near Dwellers Forest: a public participation project follow @near_dwellers Share your stories about your near dwellers. |