She chews, crunches, slurps, screams, sings, whispers, and moans….
Through an erotic, sensual, and visceral listening experience of compost plated on a banquet table, Kexin unfolds intimate relationships and proximities between our bodies and the discarded residues of what we eat.
Borrowing from ASMR mukbang—a genre of online eating show in which a host consumes food and amplifies the sounds of eating and drinking to trigger a viewer’s autonomous sensory meridian response—Kexin immerses visitors in a four-course meal and guides them into a world where guts morph into worms and tongues fondle soil. TitledLewdBanquet, here the human digestive system, culinary routines, and sexual rituals intermingle with decomposing processes and compost organisms.
The aural feast is accompanied by a toast: “Canon of Filth,” where haunting waves of melodies imitate, follow, and delay one another. As staggered voices harmonize over one another, the canon begins to resemble layers of compost and the synchronization between our intestinal and the extrinsic realms. Touring in rounds of dissonance, it celebrates the unwholesome and brings us ever closer to the dead, the rotten, and the underground, where we make life, where we make love. The performance consists of a vocal piece that borrows from ASMR mukbang (eating shows in which the host amplifies the sounds of eating to trigger a viewer’s autonomous sensory meridian response), live singing, and electronic music.
Kexin Hao (CN, 1993) is a performance artist and graphic designer born in Beijing and based in The Netherlands. What lies at the core of her art making is the creation of experiences addressing history, society and heritage through bodily engagement. The body in her practice is the research subject, the medium, and site where things happen and evolve.
Kexin’s work is interdisciplinary, research-based, hybrid and participatory. She likes to think beyond the boundaries between art and“non art” spaces, and between categories such as design, theatre, gaming, clubbing, cooking, fitness and wellness. Kexin combines a variety of media including video, printed matter, choreography, music, and food. She aims to provide the audience with playful, collective and on-site experiences which are fun while also shining new perspectives on specific topics of social relevance.
16th of May, 19:30 - 19:45 & 21:00 - 21:15. The 15-minute performance will be held twice in Mediamatic's restaurant as part of the Open City Monastery opening night. Free tickets! For questions, please send an email to program@mediamatic.nl.
