Performing Care, Alecia Neo, 2023

Performing Care is an iteration of the Care Index, an artistic research project initiated by Neo that gathers and enacts diverse care practices performed through everyday gestures and rituals by people from all walks of life. For this exhibition, Neo collaborated with dance practitioners on a video triptych that contemplates how care practices sculpt the carer’s vulnerable body, the pervasiveness of self-care industries, and how bodies could resist the pressures of bureaucratic or capitalistic systems. The choreographies in this visual poem meld the performers’ expressions of care with gestures contributed by the public via an open call process for the Care Index. Video collages of public submissions to the Index are mapped alongside prints of data concerning care provision, graphs evoking the likeness of body movement, and text annotations from workshop participants who reflected on their roles within complex care systems.

This exhibition offers movement scores for empathic understandings of care. It imagines the possibilities of embodied movements serving as tools and practices that could be translated and reinterpreted to bring care to others and self.

Venue: Esplanade Tunnel

When: 29 Sep 2023 - 7 Jan 2024,

By: Esplanade