Centre

In this experience, each object tells you a story. As they gently fly in your direction, you have to make choices: reaching for a flower, for instance, means letting go of a seashell, or a typewriter—you are unable to hold on to two things at a time. There is something incredibly uplifting and liberating about Aloft. Its use of branching narrative addresses the transient nature of our lives: you may not know how we ended up on Mars, or with hoovers instead of hands, but you sense that there is something unique in your journey and, indeed, not two people can experience the work in the same way.

Both Buddhism and performance art deal with the ephemeral and Anderson has been practicing both since the 70s. But her most recent work addresses these questions more blatantly: What would it mean to be without a body? How can we find comfort in loss, beauty in death? The artist seems to be answering her own questions, as she proposes an afterlife to the departed: the death of her piano-playing rat terrier, Lolabelle, was the inspiration for the multimedia exhibition Forty-Nine days in the Bardo (2011). In 2015, the documentary The Heart of a Dog explored similar questions and was dedicated to her late husband Lou Reed, who died in 2013.

All the Things I lost in the Flood (2018) is a beautiful collection of essays and pictures that looks at four decades of Anderson’s work and also tells of how she lost her archive and equipment when her basement was flooded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. At first devastated, she had an epiphany a few days later going through her inventory: a list of things was actually better than the actual things. “How beautiful, how magic and how catastrophic” she says in Landfall, a Grammy-winning album in collaboration with San Francisco-based sting quartet Kronos.

The starting point to To the Moon was an anecdote about a Chinese painter who had spent years working on an intricate landscape and, when finished, walked into it. It is a fitting metaphor for the works of Anderson and Huang presented at PHI: with an all-enveloping scenography, you are immersed in a mysterious and contemplative universe as soon as you walk into the installation space. As if entering a vortex, you pass through a room filled with words and drawings in chalk, a vast space with projections and a stage-like moon—a nod to French filmmaker George Méliès, to magic, illusion and the impermanence of all things. You are likely to experience multiple Bardos in these experiences.

Aloft, To the Moon and Chalkroom were presented at the PHI Centre from October 29th to January 19 2020, as part of the Cadavre exquis exhibition.