I went to Tate Modern today to see the exhibition of Tanis Bruguera. The number (i.e 10,148,451) in the exhibition’s title means the number of people who move and migrate in the world last year plus the number of people who have died and are still dying trying to move to another country. The exhibition is a social experiment that experiencing a community-driven response to the global migration crisis. As Tanis thinks everyone has their own responsibility with what is happening about them. There are 2 works in total and they are interesting. One of them is applying thermochromic ink which reacts to heat on the floor. Audiences can touch the floor by their bodies and see the embedded in the floor which is the image of Yousef, a young man who left Syria in 2011.
The room that makes people cry
Another work which draws my attention is in a white room which will make people cry. Tanis worked with chemists come up with a natural and organic compound that trigger people to cry.
When I watched the interview of Tanis Bruguera after the exhibition, there was a question asking her how can people relate to real pain when they just have something that smells and makes them cry like this? And she explained that she wants to see what happen when other people seeing someone cries. Are these people going to empathise with him/her? And is it possible to have the physical reaction before you have the emotional reaction?
Her way to make people cry is one of the exact things I have written down in my proposal that I would like to explore in my project and I think we had similar thoughts in the purpose of doing that: (link: Proposal – ver.1)
“The possibility to create a human emotion/ emotional reaction even in an artifactual way”
“I would like to explore the possibility to make an artificial emotion or emotional reaction. The purpose it not replace our original feeling but reminding everyone directly that they have their own emotion and feelings.”
However, when I entered the room, the strong smell of mint stimulated me to drop tears and I realised one thing. As I didn’t have any special feeling or emotion changed with the tears. It is the same with I cut an onion. Those tears drops were just physical reaction instead of evoking any emotion. The artifactual way to make people having an emotional reaction is hard to help us evoke our emotions. Sometimes, maybe just showing a photo or painting is more powerful to evoke people emotions just like the work of Chan Yik Long.
Wong Chui Yin, Iris 