Xavier Cha works in performance, video, and multimedia installation, always with a human focus. In various forms—live and recorded, choreographed and chaotic—her projects concern the ever-evolving ways in which we compose and communicate our selves. Actors and dancers are among her favourite subjects, as she often looks closely at the body’s training, the languages and skills it can learn. [1] Directed through abstract and illogical scenarios, her performers are reduced in disarming ways, made strange to themselves and to others. These encounters can be pleasurable, unnerving, and disorientating. They make you feel things in your own body: a tensing or quickening of the pulse, a heightened awareness of your surroundings, and how you might appear—or disappear. An abiding sense of how absurd it is to navigate the world inside such a peculiar, fleshy container.

In abduct (2015), Cha pushes these investigations into cinematic territory, exploring the ways in which our minds, bodies, and images are “taken.” Opening with a soft haze, a young man comes into view, clothed in white undergarments and standing in a brightly lit plastic chamber. He appears euphoric but also seems confused by his pleasure; the subtle movements of his eyes and mouth softly impart relief and terror. A total of seven people are successively pictured in this ambiguous space, all with intense, conflicting emotions passing through them. These feelings “are like foreign agents battling for dominance over the vessel of the face,” at times thrown off with a shudder, at others slowly dissipating. [2] Studies in cognitive science have shown that reading the facial cues of others automatically triggers bodily responses that “operate at multiple levels, some of them below the level of any kind of awareness.” [3] As viewers track the ambiguous expressions in abduct, mirror neurons flash-flash-flash, but the signals are shorted, crossed. [4] With no clear, genuine expression to hold onto, and a complete lack of context or narrative, empathy is denied, and the actors become distinctly other.

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[1] Drawn to highly physical pursuits, Cha has also collaborated with costumed entertainers (Clown Gala, 2007), opera singers (Voicedoor, 2008), and athletes (supreme ultimate exercise, 2015).

[2] Xavier Cha, email to Rose Bouthillier, September 7, 2015.

[3] Rhonda Blair, “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” The Drama Review 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009), 100.

[4] “The discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys and related mirroring mechanisms in humans has shown how we can experience empathy with others automatically, without consciously having to reconstruct the person’s state of mind.” Roger F. Cook, “Embodied simulation, empathy and social cognition: Berlin School lessons for film theory,” Screen 56, no. 2 (Summer 2015), 161.

Excerpt from “From inside,” Xavier Cha: abduct, moCa Cleveland, 2016.

The version of the film commissioned by Frieze Film can be viewed here.

Xavier Cha, abduct, 2015, video, color, sound, 12 minutes 13 seconds. Video still courtesy of the artist. Installation views by Jerry Birchfield.