Else/Xun

About

Else/Xun is a researcher and artist who works primarily with moving image, curatorial interventions and critical creative writing. Inhabiting chronic times, their practice-based research investigates the politics and potentials of care in relation to infrastructural labour of knowledge production and maintenance, where they practise an expanded form of authorship through gathering, sharing, repairing and translating. Understanding themselves as a porous, nomadic container, they work and observe their workings as a space that holds, supporting relations to move through their background presence.

Else/Xun is part of an artist collective, 河邊哼歌 Hebianhengge, and has shown and spoken at Tate Late, Cooke Latham Gallery, Queer Circle, Southwark Park Galleries and Manchester China Institute, among others. They work and live in London and hold an MRes in Arts and Humanities, followed by an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the RCA.

The Snow to Fall (2024)

Single channel moving image installation, colour, sound, 7’34’’

The Snow to Fall bears witness to the obscure contours of a heritage site undergoing maintenance. Two voices, whose presence is known through subtitles at the two ends of the screen, discuss in an exhaustive language the interiors of the room, the story of a boulder encountered in a mountain house, and the dust that keeps coming back. They hold on to the conversation to survive the time, but the time does not end.

With gratitude to Carlyle’s House, National Trust, and the legends and stories of Am Monadh Ruadh / The Cairngorms.

Excerpt available here.

Fieldnotes (2024)

Mild steel, stainless steel, found rocks, 17.0×10.5×24.5cm (#1); 6.5×3.5×3.0cm (#2); 6.5×4.5×2.5cm (#3)

Fieldnotes is a series of support structures made for found rocks.

Peripheral Attention (2024)

A group exhibition curated by Else/Xun, with contributions from artists Ahed Al Kathiri, Else/Xun, Julia Agnieszka Issi, and Yigo Jia. 30 Jan-7 Feb 2024, Pending Space, Royal College of Art, London.

Peripheral Attention is a group exhibition that examines the texture of attention practised from multiple peripheries across explorations of diasporic longing, crip body, walking/drifting, and politics of care. Moving away from established knowledge structures where otherness is mapped, these explorations propose modes of attention that activate embodied and situated ways of knowing.

Artists were invited to hold space for slow, intimate engagement with the works: spatial conditions such as seats, cushions and curtains that guided the gestures of sitting, stopping, resting, staying, waiting. Part of the exhibition space was left empty to maintain its routine use as a rest space by nearby students.

This exhibition also featured a temporary open library, where artists shared reference materials related to their works such as books, zines, objects and photographs for viewers to spend time with.