Configurations
Patty Chang
张怡
Production date
2017
Object Detail
Media
dual channel video
Measurements
'Configurations': 13 min 14 sec
'Configurations Performance Documentation': 6 min 49 sec
'Configurations Performance Documentation': 6 min 49 sec
Notes
Chang’s continuing investigation of water sources included an expedition to the world’s longest aqueduct, China’s South–North Water Diversion Project. This feat of engineering – or perhaps, of hubris – began with Mao Zedong’s proposal to bring water from southern China to the dry north. Construction of the Danjiangkou Dam in Hubei Province in 1958 created an enormous reservoir, drowning the ancient city of Junzhou with its hundreds of Daoist temples and palaces, and tens of thousands of tombs. It still lies submerged. Construction for the South–North Water Diversion Project began in 2002, and the aqueduct, the largest transfer of water in history, finally opened in 2014. Water is carried in canals, tunnels and pipelines, taking fifteen days to arrive in Beijing. Configurations is part travelogue documentary, part autobiography and part performance. Linking a poetics of landscape with the physicality of her body, she travelled the entire length of the aqueduct; every time she came across it she urinated into a ‘female urinary device’ (sometimes commercially produced, and sometimes home-made using discarded plastic bottles and containers) that allowed her to pee standing up. She juxtaposed her female body, and its consumption and elimination of water, with another gendered narrative – the ‘masculine’ reshaping of landscape and diversion of rivers overseen by engineers.
Accession number
2018.004