Remote Intimacies: Stranger at Home

Stranger at Home: Xina Xurner, Young Joon Kwak & Christopher Richmond

Stranger at Home is a video and performance assemblage that interpolates a performance by Xina Xurner with Young Joon Kwak and Christopher Richmond’s three-channel video installation Slow Dance (2014). Slow Dance follows a central figure discomfited by, and awkwardly moving through and interacting with an unfamiliar, heteronormative domestic space. She contends with the confinements of absent intimacy, ideas of “home,” and the slow and subtle doom of everyday gendered ennui and dysphoria. The three channels, originally shown in a gallery setting, are recontextualized through the Zoom screen format, imbuing the proceedings with additional layers of distance, isolation, anxiety, and disembodiment. Stranger at Home culminates in Xina Xurner’s doom metal-inspired sonic swirl of distortion, embodying the exhaustion and yearning for intimacy wrought by a year of distancing, not just from others, but, ultimately, from one’s self and one’s domestic and intimate spaces. 

Bios: 

Young Joon Kwak is a LA-based multidisciplinary artist who reimagines bodies and the power structures that govern our everyday lives as mutable and permeable sites of agency. (youngjoon.com)

Christopher Richmond creates videos, photographs, and drawings that interweave the realism of documentary with science fiction and myth. (christopherchristopher.com)

Xina Xurner is a noise-dance band with Marvin Astorga and Kwak, whose performances combine electronics, mutated vocals, and bad drag to create sadical and sexperimental anthems of transformation, rebirth, and renewal. (xinaxurner.com)

Remote Intimacies is a series of new and experimental performances created specifically for online viewing and commissioned and co-organized by the ONE Archives at USC Libraries and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York. Debuting October 7 on Zoom, the invited artists will explore how to sustain intimacy in these highly mediated times and how to imagine opportunities for communion across temporal and geographic distances. The series takes its title from scholar Karen Tongson’s theory on the powerful resonance of shared consumption and their capacity to “bring people, things, and concepts together, even if space and time dictates their dispersal and isolation." Participants include Brontez Purnell (October 7); Joseph Liatela (November 18); and Mikki Yamashiro (December 16). Additional artists for the spring Remote Intimacies program will include Katarzyna Perlak (April), Dayna Danger (May 6), and Alli Logout (June 10).