Liao Wen 廖雯
Down the Eye of Polyphemos 坠入巨人之眼, 2024
彩色有声单频影像 single-channel color video with sound
4'9"
montage by Liao Wen; sound by Anita Pan
剪辑：廖雯；声音：潘丽
montage by Liao Wen; sound by Anita Pan
剪辑：廖雯；声音：潘丽
Edition of 5 plus 1 artist's proof
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The title of the video is inspired by the one-eyed cyclops who was tricked and blinded by Odysseus and the other human visitors in Homer’s Odyssey. Footage of industrial practice...
The title of the video is inspired by the one-eyed cyclops who was tricked and blinded by Odysseus and the other human visitors in Homer’s Odyssey. Footage of industrial practice and natural phenomena are interspersed with scenes that depict brutal acts against the body and anatomical drawings that reveal the insides of organisms. The work hopes to interrogate the violence embedded in human hands, man-made tools, and, by extension, everyday scientific and manufacturing activities.
The image of the blinded cyclops wronged by human-centric imperatives, as well as that of the sliced eye from Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, reject the priority of the eye, shifting the sensory hierarchy to privilege touch and intuition. This is an outgrowth of my continuous exploration of the abject. The pupil refocuses at some point, refreshing the vision before re-centering on representations of hands that repeatedly perform acts that commit violence against others in what seems to be a ritualistic behavior.
The act of penetration, in certain cultures, forms an important part of rituals. The Brazilian indigenous people known as the Bororo believe that piercing the soft parts of the body (ears, nostrils, lips, etc.) and replacing them with hard and nondecomposable things such as fingernails, claws, teeth, and shells will protect the bodily orifices from exposure to evil influences. In the video, I attempt to juxtapose these acts of preservation with weird rituals, wherein forms of penetration – such wood drilling, mechanical fish slicing, and pearl beading – are used as a tool for enhancing economic productivity at the expense of other species.
The image of the blinded cyclops wronged by human-centric imperatives, as well as that of the sliced eye from Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, reject the priority of the eye, shifting the sensory hierarchy to privilege touch and intuition. This is an outgrowth of my continuous exploration of the abject. The pupil refocuses at some point, refreshing the vision before re-centering on representations of hands that repeatedly perform acts that commit violence against others in what seems to be a ritualistic behavior.
The act of penetration, in certain cultures, forms an important part of rituals. The Brazilian indigenous people known as the Bororo believe that piercing the soft parts of the body (ears, nostrils, lips, etc.) and replacing them with hard and nondecomposable things such as fingernails, claws, teeth, and shells will protect the bodily orifices from exposure to evil influences. In the video, I attempt to juxtapose these acts of preservation with weird rituals, wherein forms of penetration – such wood drilling, mechanical fish slicing, and pearl beading – are used as a tool for enhancing economic productivity at the expense of other species.