LT
Erica Zhan is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist and writer, based between Chicago and elsewhere. They employ performances, films, images and writing to interrogate professionalism, competition, regulation and vulnerability in late capitalism. Zhan acts as a rule hacker and an alternative player in their practices in order to reveal and provoke the regulation of normality. Their investigated themes include sports, games, health care, consumption and advertisement. By using humor and irony, Zhan wants to scrutinize the zones of freedom in human society that have been eroded by standardization.
During their residency at SODAS 2123, Zhan will continue their research on games and competition. They plan on developing an essay film alongside their performance experiments that examines the emotional entanglements of watching sports – the admiration and thrill of athletic performance, as well as the aggression and fractures intensified by nationalism. Drawing from the spectacle of professional sports, their work interrogates the tensions between desire, vulnerability, and collective frenzy.
SODAS 2123 is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.