Video/Film
Four-channel 4K video, colour, sound, 1’07”, 3’36”, 3’31”, 4’02”
3+2AP (#2/3)
0Victoria Sin (b. 1991) currently lives and works in London, UK.
Renowned drag queen Victoria Sin combined their drag with multimedia art forms since 2013. Alternative narration is the aesthetic prominence of their video works.
‘Narrative Reflections on Looking’ is a series of films on the dynamics of power and desire in the experience of identifying with images.
In 'Preface/Looking Without Touching', the lines of embodiment and parody of western beauty ideals are blurred in Sin's drag persona, and viewers are invited to look at a breathing image which references the visual language of cinema and systems of looking in which femininity and feminine bodies are predefined.
In ‘Part One/She Was More than the Sum of My Parts', we relive the narrators experience of encountering an image which bears an unusual resemblance to them, and their attempt to connect with the image in a meaningful way. Sin's drag persona appears pristine at first, though as the camera is allowed closer, makeup cracks and loose eyelashes suggest the body behind the image.
'Part Two/The Reprise of Cthulhu', is the story of the narrator's cannibalisation via a look from an otherworldly woman. Sin's drag persona appears first as the predatory figure in a theatrical setting from a cloud of smoke, and advances into the light only to have the camera consume them from head to toe, leaving the question of who has cannibalised who.
In 'Part three/Cthulhu Through the Looking Glass', we pick up from where part one left off. The image has transformed to suggest a consummation as the narrator's desperation to connect with the image encountered on the page culminates in a scenario which is at once absurd, erotic and violent. 