11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The immediacy of Angela Goh’s mode of address is apparent as the choreographer dances directly before the audience in the gallery. While Goh also makes performances for the theatre context, her works in galleries use little-to-no staging. The viewer stands on the floor in front of Goh, often amid paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints by other artists. The clothes Goh wears for her performances are minimal: black T-shirt or white singlet, jeans or trackpants, paired with runners. Wearing similar garb to what she does in everyday life signals that Goh is not inhabiting a character. The way she moves, however, is strange. It’s this undermining of reality that gives Goh’s practice a weird edge. The embodied archive Goh draws upon within her repertoire is similarly drawn from the everyday, as well as from books, films, mythology and historical events. These gestures are collected, studied, refined and reinterpreted in a process the choreographer-dancer evocatively describes as cutting, looping and smuggling. In her scores, oscillating moments are interrupted by a pause or by Goh spinning on an axis, followed by motions recognised as being performed earlier but now in reverse. Movements are often distilled to their most specific components; slowed down to the point at which they appear strange; reversed so they are seen anew; and repeated and repeated so the viewer is lured into studying them a little deeper. Goh’s works capture the reordering of time that has come to typify social-media video editing, yet achieves this without the digital crutch. It makes for deeply uncanny and utterly compelling viewing. There is a discipline in Goh’s technique that commands the audience’s attention in the vast and often distracting spaces of the contemporary art museum. In Pattern Recognition 2023, for example, Goh stands utterly still while one part of her body performs an intense solo, such as gesticulating her tongue. The chosen body part is articulated in unusual directions, with strange pacing, as if taken over by another life form — conjuring images from fantastical religious tales or scenes from science fiction. This gore-less body horror is quietly terrifying because it visualises a loss of sovereignty without an obvious cause. Achieving this effect of being inhabited by a more-than-human entity requires physical discipline. When making a new work, such as Total 2024 for the Asia Pacific Triennial, Goh’s repository of gestures is recombined, reordered and added to, then rehearsed, recorded, reviewed and rehearsed some more so that they are committed to muscle memory. Memory and time remain the subject and materials of Goh’s practice. ELLIE BUTTROSE BORN 1986, CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA LIVES+WORKS INSYDNEY, AUSTRALIA ANGELAGOH Pattern Recognition (performed at Fine Arts, Sydney) 2023 / Image courtesy: The artist and Fine Arts, Sydney / Photograph: Zan Wimberley ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 90 — 91