Review

Beyond Escape: Empowerment and the Reclamation of History in Torsos in Rain

Installation view of Torsos in Rain at New Uncanny Gallery. Courtesy of the curator and New Uncanny Gallery, photographed by Yuhan Shen.

Exhibition under review

Torsos in Rain, New Uncanny Gallery, September 14 – October 11, 2024

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What is history? Inspired by Deleuze’s theory of “Becoming-animal” (which explores continuous transformation and the breaking down of boundaries), young curator Rui Jiang sees this question as a path to understanding history not as a fixed record but as a series of transformations—fluid and uncontainable.1 In the show Torsos in Rain, which ran New Uncanny Gallery in New York beginning September 14, Jiang gathers sixteen performance-based pieces from nineteen artists to explore the fragmented, constantly shifting nature of history through the perspectives of creators, narrators, and audiences. Through the ephemeral medium of performance, the exhibition challenges viewers to consider how the past is captured, understood, and reclaimed as a source of empowerment. In becoming, history resists any final form, always remaining open to change and reinterpretation.

New Uncanny Gallery is an unconventional—and, well, new—space sitting in West Harlem. An artist-run, artist-directed transdisciplinary exhibition space, it showcases experimental works pushing the boundaries of traditional art genres. Torsos in Rain marks the gallery’s second installment, continuing the space’s mission to explore the intersection of art, history, and performance. Jiang transforms the industrial space both visually—through softly illuminated fabrics, subtle color schemes, and immersive projections—and rhythmically, by carefully pacing the arrangement of the pieces. The raw, unfinished elements of the space are juxtaposed with flowing textiles and dynamic installations, making the gallery itself an active participant in the conversation about history and transformation. This spatial transformation allows the performances to unfold organically, enveloping the audience and drawing them into the work.

Installation View of exhibition text for Torsos in Rain at New Uncanny Gallery (September 14–October 11, 2024).Courtesy of the curator and New Uncanny Gallery, photographed by Yuhan Shen.

The show is presented in three chapters: “Monument of Bended Knees,” “Stealing Fire,” and “Escape from the Tiger’s Teeth.” Each chapter serves as a distinct yet interconnected exploration of how history is constructed, deconstructed, and ultimately re-imagined. “Monument of Bended Knees” presents fragmented narratives that resist linearity and closure, opening with a live performance, Pequeño hogar, turn your back to the forest and your front to me, in which performers Marco Guagnelli Gonzalez and Steph Patsula use clothing as a metaphor for oral histories, crafting an intricate reflection on identity and memory. Their live performance, centered around the act of sewing, emphasizes how identities are continuously patterned, cut, and reassembled—much like fabric. As if the tight metaphor isn’t enough, the mechanical, almost militant hum of sewing machines vibrating against the metal floor evokes a sense of resistance, further exemplifying that each stitch is a defiant act against the rigid structures of historical narratives. 

Through this visceral process, the piece conjures a guerrilla-like operation, reworking the personal and collective memories that shape us. Serving as the opening performance for Chapter I of Torsos in RainPequeño hogar, turn your back to the forest and your front to me reveals a collection of pieces that examines how history is often preserved through fragmented pieces—documents, artifacts, memories—that attempt to provide a sense of continuity. Yet, these fragments are incomplete, leaving gaps that performers attempt to fill through their acts of embodiments.

Marco Guagnelli Gonzalez and Steph Patsula“Pequeño hogar, turn your back to the forest and your front to me,” 2024, live performance at Torsos in Rain at New Uncanny Gallery. Courtesy of the curator and New Uncanny Gallery, photographed by Junyan Ivan Chen.

The second chapter, “Stealing Fire,” focuses on the rebellious act of understanding and recapturing history—not as a linear sequence of what the curator calls “critical moments,” but as a fragmented and constantly disrupted narrative. The title of the chapter draws from the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, suggesting that history, too, can be stolen from those who claim ownership of it. One anchor piece in this chapter is Surgical Sacrifice, a collaborative performance and installation by Cass Yao, Sylvia Ke, and the performer who goes by Pllsxy. This gory installation, made from silicone and resin, confronts the audience with visceral representations of pain and transcendence. Pools of uncured liquid leak from the installation, accompanied by Ke’s intensified train noise, creating a loud ambiance that embodies Yao’s lived experience with chronic illness and the physical and emotional transformations that come with it.

In the artists’ words, the performance reflects “the dissection of the soul” and “the surgical dance” of fragmentation and transformation. Through this visceral imagery, Yao and Ke invite viewers to consider the body as a site of both trauma and transcendence. The installation evokes a “sacred surgery” in which the boundaries between nature and non-nature blur, as the soul undergoes dissection not on the body itself, but on its symbolic representation. The uncured materials, still in the process of transformation, speak to the ongoing nature of pain and how the body continually reorganizes itself in response to suffering. In this act of reclaiming the narrative of the body, Surgical Sacrifice becomes a powerful metaphor for the fragmented, nonlinear way that history—and personal experience—can be understood.

Cass Yao, Sylvia Ke, and Pllsxy, Surgical Sacrifice, 2024, live performance (top) and performance artifacts installation (bottom), at Torsos in Rain at New Uncanny Gallery. Courtesy of the curator and New Uncanny Gallery, photographed by Yuhan Shen.

While Yao and Ke opted for intensified visualizations and audiolization through visceral symbols and textures, another piece from this chapter, Stillness by Kyriakos Apostolidis, Yezhou Zheng, and Juan Eduardo Flores, caught my attention. The piece equally represents suffering and pain but is conveyed purely through silence and subtle endurance. The performance hinges on a long, grueling act: the performer holds their arms horizontally elevated for nearly eight hours, a feat of sheer endurance that takes place largely before the audience even arrives. By the time viewers enter the space, they witness only the residual traces of the performer’s struggle. A video projection remains, capturing the performer’s action from multiple angles alongside a timer and the performer’s brain waves documented during the endurance act. For the audience entering New Uncanny Gallery at any time, the documentation distills hours of suffering into a brief, fragmented visual memory, emphasizing the idea that pain—though it may last for what seems like an eternity—can be reduced to a fleeting historical record. 

The physical endurance, initially so present in the performer’s body, becomes abstracted in the projection, transforming an intensely personal experience into an objectified artifact of endurance. In contrast to the materiality of Surgical Sacrifice, Stillness reflects on the temporal nature of pain, illustrating how even the most prolonged suffering can be condensed into a mere trace of its former intensity. Common to this piece and others in Chapter II is that the artists embody the role of disruptors who dismantle the “critical moments” that define historical narratives. Collectively, the chapter shows how performances forge new histories by dismantling the old, and how individuals can reclaim agency over the past through their own creative processes.

Kyriakos Apostolidis, Yezhou Zheng, and Juan Eduardo Flores, Stillness, 2024, performance video installation Torsos in Rain at New Uncanny Gallery. Courtesy of the curator and New Uncanny Gallery, photographed by Yuhan Shen.

Curator Rui Jiang named the final chapter “Escape from the Tiger’s Teeth” to evoke the sense of relief and self-discovery that follows the struggle between fleeing from and confronting the past. The metaphor of the tiger’s teeth suggests danger and predation, symbolizing the risks of engaging with history in ways that might consume the self. However, the “escape” signifies how the artists in this chapter harness their personal histories to empower themselves, creating new realities and spaces of freedom.

A striking example of this is Singularities by Lucia Shuyu Li, a colorful and dreamlike piece situated at the back of the exhibition. Through this imaginative work, Li transformed the back corner of New Uncanny Gallery into her dreamscape. Projecting abstract symbols painted on her own body onto the walls, she merges her corporeal form with her artistic practice. The body becomes a canvas, with each medium—whether it be her physical self or the vibrant colors and abstract forms she creates—acting as a bridge between her inner world and the external environment. The continuous projection, like the ebb and flow between self and the outside world, moves fluidly across the space, blurring the line between reality and dream. By intertwining these elements, Li crafts an immersive world where the past, body, and imagination converge, illustrating the chapter’s theme of transforming historical struggle into a realm of empowerment and escape.

Lucia Shuyu Li, Singularities, 2024, mixed media installation at Torsos in Rain at New Uncanny Gallery. Courtesy of the curator and New Uncanny Gallery, photographed by Yuhan Shen. 

While Jiang views the artists in this chapter as extricating themselves from difficult positions by letting their history empower them, I do not perceive a sense of relief akin to escaping predators—as if history is a consuming monster. Instead, the show itself, in its entirety, seems to argue the opposite. Torsos in Rain is a testament to the agency of both creators and audiences in navigating the river of time. It is never a matter of luck or fortune that artists reclaim and transform history through their work. Through persistent reflection and continuous labor, the creators in this show do not merely escape history’s grasp—they actively reshape it, demonstrating their command over the stories they inherit. The idea of escape overlooks the power dynamics in play: it is not history that defines these artists, but their art that redefines history. The audience, too, is part of this process, absorbing and participating in the reimagining of historical narratives. To describe this as “escape” misses the point—the real narrative here is one of empowerment, where art becomes a tool for reclaiming and reshaping the past, rather than a means of evading its clutches.

This also explains the importance of performance for the exhibition. A show about the subjectivity of history could easily be filled with countless “factual” artifacts, items that claim to represent history as it was. In contrast, performances leave only traces—essence and fragmented images, shattered wooden scraps from repeated labor, gory bodily forms representing the once intense interactions presented live. After the sound fades and the video glitches into digital noise, what remains are artifacts without context. The history we receive is never complete, always partial, obscured, and open to reinterpretation. Torsos in Rain’s performances embrace this fluidity, allowing history to be constantly reshaped and re-experienced rather than fossilized as a singular, immutable truth. 

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Endnotes

  1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238.