TOXX

‘toxicity [Is] an animated, active, and peculiarly queer agent’

- MEL CHEN

TOXX is a single channel video work wondering what bodies becomes after an epoch defined by contamination. As studies identify microplastics in clouds, air pollution particles in placentas, and PFAS ‘forever’ chemicals in 90% of tested breast milk, TOXX is a meditation on microbial migrations and the choreographies of change in an epoch defined by toxicity. Exploring a planetary inheritance of industrial residue, this work confronts the grotesque figurations of earths present, and wonders at the uncanny futures that might evolve from it. Here, the porous progeny of the Toxicocene find themselves united in contamination across every cell, site, and species. Resisting the urge to withdraw from the disquiet of such intimate incursions, the eco-monstrous figures of TOXX invite us to turn towards the chimeric forms who haunt ecologic myths of purity or return. TOXX lingers in the disquiet of post-normal narratives, refusing the convenience of utopic/dystopic binaries, to instead favour the morphic muck of transition without the expectation of arrival. The Toxicocene offers no apocalypse, no salvific future, only the motley miasma of bodies seeping, blooming, metabolising and mutating in transition, unceasing. A toxomythology without end.

OXX was first presented at the Center for Projection Art and Bunjil Place for the Body-Cites program as a part of FRAME: A BIENNIAL OF DANCE 2023. It has since been programmed by the City of Hobart as a part of the Hobart Current biennial exhibition to screen at Loop Gallery for Epoch: Loop, and by Interface Video Art Festival in Croatia.

You can see the original program listing here, and read a brief review of TOXX here.

Single Channel: 15:00 min

Sound composition: Stephanie Speirs

Performance: Tamsyn Heynes

Artistic Assistance: Jess Ngaio