This programme features moving image works that reflect on time and performativity. They demonstrate how acts of physical endurance test the body’s limits and mirror the laborious processes of art making, and ultimately, of navigating life’s challenges. In these works, the camera serves as both a tool and an ally in constructing each narrative, examining the relationship between performance and the moving image—two forms of time-based practice.

Norio Imai’s Time Clothing (1978) captures the artist’s process of creating an outfit by photographing himself with a Polaroid camera, merging the immediacy of instant photography with the waiting process for images to develop and the simultaneity of video to form an intriguing time constellation. A six-minute extract from He Yunchang’s hour-long performance Wrestling: One and One Hundred (2001) offers a glimpse of the artist wrestling with one hundred men who compete for a chance to win five renminbi. Endurance is also central to Melati Suryodarmo’s performance Exergie—Butter Dance (2000), in which she dances on melting blocks of butter, creating an exhausting choreography of falling and rising that embodies her broader life struggles. Ishu Han’s Not Ocean (2024) portrays the artist swimming across the dry land of a former gold mine, illustrating the tension between aspiration and survival. Similarly, Neco Lo Che Ying’s Night of a Sleepy Writer (1980) ponders artistic labour through experimental-film imagery and stop-motion animation to render a writer’s nocturnal cycles of despair and productive creativity.

In Bani Abidi’s and Taysir Batniji’s works about regulatory performance, individuals are asked to patiently wait, and to conform to prescribed routes and rules to apply for a visa or cross a checkpoint. Batniji’s Transit (2004) reflects on constrained Palestinian mobility and elapsed time through a slideshow of photographs secretly taken at the Egypt–Gaza border. Shots of waiting passengers alternate with black slides, all timed to sync up to the sound of a projector. Abidi’s The Distance from Here (2009) stages a fictional experience of visa applicants navigating bureaucratic protocols in South Asia, highlighting prolonged waits and repetitive embassy rituals that expose their vulnerabilities within arbitrary control systems.