This work takes as its starting point the space it was commissioned for—a 2200 square metre subterranean concrete bunker, containing 125 vertical columns, built as a secret WWII oil tank, which had since laid dormant below ground until it was converted into the lower level of a new museum, with the sole architectural intervention being a spiral staircase that visitors may use to descend downwards, around and around into the abyss.
Axe Arc Echo questions what it means to descend. To go down is to go backwards in time, and the deeper you go the more nonhuman it gets. To get caught in the underworld is to get caught in a temporality that has no direction because it is eternal. To look to the future ahead and the past behind, is only to see as far as history, but to plot a vertical axis is to encounter time on an epic scale.
A 2 hour performance, Axe Arc Echo uses the body to evoke the scale of the imperceptible to the colossal. A single body traverses a cavernous space. She is in constant motion, appearing and disappearing through the forest of 125 concrete columns, entangling presence and absence in a way which alludes to her flickering in and out of time. She exploits all of her bodily axes, twisting in multiple directions through a constant, unwavering torsion up and down the body, all the while gliding in endless motion across the enormous space. Twisting one way but travelling the other, her direction of movement appears miraculous, or malevolent. Either way, directionality can no longer be trusted, as backwards becomes forwards, upwards is downwards, above is below, and time and space dissolve in controlled disorientation.
Created and performed by Angela Goh
Composer & Sound Designer: Corin Ileto
Lighting Designer: Govin Ruben
Technical Director: Matt Cornell
Commissioning Curator: Lisa Catt
Program Producer: Katy Green Loughrey
Axe Arc Echo was the inaugural performance commission for The Tank at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Supported by: The Keir Foundation, and The Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Performances:
October 7-8 – The Tank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Photos by Lucy Parakhina
Video documentation by Matthew McGuigan