JESSICA LARAINE WILLIAMS
Edited scenes from Inherited Conflicts, 2013
Made in collaboration with Jacqueline Stojanović, video, 00:06:40.
Inherited Conflicts was a short collaborative video intent on navigating culturally pervasive dialogues of war that are transmitted across generations. Although often reiterated through spoken and written exchanges, the residue of these lived experiences persists in the collective identity of nations, unable to be absolved. As two descendants of such conflict in Serbia and Vietnam, Stojanović and Williams were collaborators both in the making of this work and in the inheritance of their forebears. Set in an innocuous and unspecified interior zone, a ritual of exchanges was orchestrated between two artists. The remembrance of broadly documented brutality was made tactile and personal through the motif of photographs immersed in liquid, an act of failed ablution left embodied on the skin. These edited scenes focus on Williams' performance only, presenting an artistic lineage which anchors her work White, Passing, 2020 included in On Kindness and Care:
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HO TZU NYEN
Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, 2012–ongoing
…the Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (cdosea), begins with a question: what constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia — a region never unified by language, religion or political power?
cdosea proceeds by proposing 26 terms — one for each letter of the English / Latin alphabet. Each term is a concept, a motif, or a biography, and together they are threads weaving together a torn and tattered tapestry of Southeast Asia. (Ho Tzu Nyen, n.d.)
VISIT Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia
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JESSICA LARAINE WILLIAMS
Null Cartography: Performing Self, 2018-ongoing
Performing Self (2018–ongoing) is a fixation with femme costume signifiers, particularly towards their utility as social constructs and apparatus potentiate. This Shermanesque fixation queers the genealogy of the Eurocentric male dandy, retaining an attentiveness to self-realisation through visual cues. In the imaging, adornment and public presentation of an amorphous femme self, this practice is an identity performance that is above all playful; it is underpinned by the personal commitment to always be overdressed for every occasion. (Jessica Laraine Williams, 2020)
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