Yo-Yo Lin, documentation image of c h a n n e l s at The Shed, New York, 2022. Photo: Steve Dabal. Courtesy of the artist.
Healing as Becoming: A Dialogue with Yo-Yo Lin
Reading and film screenings, with guest Hannah Krafcik
Artistic Research in a World on Fire is a series of talks, workshops, screenings, and live performances curated by Lucy Cotter in conjunction with the release of her new book, Reclaiming Artistic Research – Expanded Second Edition (2024). Cotter is a Stelo Arts project resident 2023-34.
About The Event
Lucy Cotter’s book Reclaiming Artistic Research (2024) engages with artistic practice as knowledge through a series of 24 dialogues with artists worldwide. In their dialogue, multidisciplinary artist Yo-Yo Lin reflects on how she uses embodied performance, video, publishing and social organizing to lean into nuanced transcultural imaginaries around the body and incorporate experiences of chronic pain, chronic illness, and disability to create platforms for connectivity where new bodies of knowledge can be formed collectively. Lin’s practice engages with art as a space for unlearning interlocking paradigms of ableist, racist, and anti-queer thinking.
In this event, Lucy Cotter will read excerpts of the dialogue and offer some reflections in conversation with guest artist Hannah Krafcik, whose transdisciplinary neuroqueer practice shares affinities with Lin’s practice. Krafcik has previously performed Lin’s collaborative work Distance Rituals (made with Yidan Zeng) together with her long-term collaborator dancer and body worker Emily Jones.
This event will feature two accompanying screenings of works by Yo-Yo Lin: an excerpt from Channels (2022), a multisensory performance, held at The Shed, New York in 2022, and a video work by Yo-Yo Lin entitled Re:collections (2021).
Yo-Yo Lin, Re:collections (2021)
HD video, TRT: 21 minutes
Re:collections / 再次·回顧 remembers lost language in the body, across land and in alternate universes. Following a recent return to the artist’s motherland in Taiwan during the pandemic, the film is a first-person account of returning to a site of medical and familial trauma years later. Moving through the artist’s intimate thoughts, Re:collections explores the fallibility of time and ambiguousness of placehood in an ever-shifting disabled, immigrant body. Melding together new media performance, self-documentary, and frameworks of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Taoist cosmology, the film interweaves the mundane with the magical, offering openings for grief, wonder and radical multiplicity.
channels (2022)
Performance documentation, The Shed, New York
TRT: 27 mins. (Abridged version from 60 minute performance.)
channels (2022) is a multisensory performance exploring the intricate pathways of the body. Lin understands us all to inhabit multiple bodies: ones made up of what we commonly think of as our physical body composed of its parts and organs, and others seemingly invisible, extending beyond the skin, taking the form of energetic fields and kindred relationships. In her work, she generates connections within and between these bodies through the concept of qi 氣, networked technologies, and disabled embodiment. As materials for this exploration, she uses and amplifies the connective tissue of her own body as well as the care relationships that bond two or more bodies together. The work includes an interdependent, cyborgian feedback loop of generative music and dance in collaboration with sound artist Despina, followed by a virtual exchange, experimenting with presence and crip movement choreographed and performed live with New Zealand/ Aotearoa based artist Pelenakeke Brown.
This event is free and open to the public. The event will be in-person at Stelo Arts in downtown Portland. Stelo is an ADA accessible downtown space, close to public transport. Please feel free to get in touch if you wish to discuss any access needs.
Please RSVP by securing your free ticket below.
Lucy Cotter, portrait: Photo by Mario Gallucci
Hannah Krafcik and Emily Jones , documentation of The Swirl, work in progress, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artists.
About Lucy Cotter
Lucy Cotter is a writer, artist, and curator whose practice engages with art as a form of knowledge and a site for radical cultural transformation. Her critical and experimental writing has appeared in journals (Flash Art, Hyperallergic, Frieze, Mousse, Artforum), academic books, and catalogs. She was curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, and Curator in Residence at Oregon Center for Contemporary Art 2021-2, with additional projects at The Kitchen, New York, Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam, the Stedelijk Museum, and EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam. Cotter has lectured at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute and was the inaugural director of the Master Artistic Research program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis focused on decolonizing curatorial practice. Irish-born, she is based in Portland, where she is a project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, 2023-24.
About Yo-Yo Lin
Yo-Yo Lin 林友友 is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with chronic illness and intergenerational trauma.
Hannah Krafcik is a Portland-based transdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices include dance and new media.
About this series
This event is part of the Artistic Research in a World on Fire series of talks,
workshops, screenings, and live performances curated by Lucy Cotter in 2024-25 in
conjunction with the release of her new book, Reclaiming Artistic Research –
Expanded Second Edition (2024). Cotter is a Stelo Arts project resident 2023-24.